Whatever We Lose
by Cartographical
Summary: There are only these truths for him: Someone wants Kate dead. Kate wants him. He cannot let her walk out his door alone.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes:** Spoilers for Always. This is going to wind up a bit on the, um, longer side.

Thanks to JillianCasey, for refusing to allow me to delete this after the first scene and for constantly reminding me that not writing is not actually an option, to Cora Clavia, for always being willing to listen to me whine, to Kiki, for pointing out all of my totally ridiculous mistakes and for quoting poetry at me, and to Sandiane Carter and chezchuckles, for constantly encouraging/threatening/cajoling my ridiculous, pathetic flopping self and for feeding me all sorts of fic scraps to bolster me along the way.

The title is from maggie and milly and molly and may, by ee cummings.

If Castle and Beckett were mine… oh. I don't even know what to say here anymore.

* * *

Beckett's laughing throatily in his ear, her hand tripping along his chest, her body pressed against the curve of his spine. The condom's in the nightstand and he's trying to feel for it, but eventually he has to prop himself up and away from her to reach into the back of the drawer. Right as he lifts, his phone lights up.

He freezes.

She doesn't notice at first, her hand skimming over the plane of his abdomen, her calf nudging between his. "I'm tired of waiting," she murmurs huskily into his ear, playful. He can barely hear her over the thundering of his pulse, thumping triple time from a fast-dying arousal and an ever-growing fear.

"Kate," he starts, his voice strangled, choked.

She stills instantly, her body going rigid in a beat. He shuts his eyes against it, wishes only for the drape of her loose limbs back against his.

But they need to move.

They need to move now.

"What?" she murmurs, voice low.

He grabs the phone with shaking fingers, thumbs to the text from an unknown number, rolls onto his back, holds it out to her.

_The deal is over. Get her out now._

Her eyes darken as she reads. "This could be anything," she tries, desperate and hollow.

"It's not. You know it's not," he says, panic starting to claw at his throat, brutal and desperate, clogging his veins.

She's stone-still a heartbeat more and then she's moving, shoving herself away from him, off the bed, and he can't, he can't, the storm is still going outside and there's a sudden flash that lights up the bare arc of her back, the strong line of her bicep.

She's ready, finally ready, finally _here_, and now she's being hunted.

She bends, lifts her pants and shirt and jacket from where they're puddled on the floor, shimmies into the jeans with a speed borne from a hundred early-morning crime scenes. They must be cold, he thinks, as she starts to shrug into her lacy black bra. "Your clothes are wet," he murmurs inanely.

"It's still raining outside, anyway," she says, shoving her hair away from her cheek. It's just starting to dry, falling now in damp curls down her back.

He sits, blinks, tries to think, finally settles on at least getting some forward momentum as he swings his legs off the bed. She's in front of him, suddenly, her hand on his shoulder, still in just jeans and a bra.

They need to move. He shifts forward to stand. She presses down, hard, pushing him into the bed.

"Lie down, Castle," she says, quiet, serious.

She must be confused. He stays sitting. "Beckett, I don't know who could have sent that text, but there are a limited number of people who know about this situation and I don't think any of them would see fit to joke about it."

She shakes her head once, a sharp, staccato movement. "I know. Lie down. Go to sleep."

The realization rushes over him all at once, cold and terrible. "You're out of your mind," he growls.

The hand on his shoulder tightens. "You were done. It was over."

"You can't be serious," he breathes.

"Just – go back to that. It's not any different, now."

"It's not any different?" he asks. Yells, maybe, from the stricken look on her face.

"Please," she whispers. "You were right."

"It's not your _choice_." He's not quite sure whether he's referring to her being hunted or his going with her. It doesn't matter.

Her nails bite into his shoulder. "What about Alexis?"

The image of his daughter's wracked face sways him for an instant, but it's nothing, nothing compared to the thought of Beckett walking back out his door, alone, into the storm. "I'll see that she gets on the next plane to visit Meredith. It's been forever since Mother's gotten out to California. She can go with her."

She's shaking her head slowly at him and her hand is still on his shoulder, but they're losing time, the text read _now_, they need to go.

He surges up against the firm pressure of her hand, and she stumbles back a step – "Sorry, sorry," he murmurs – and then he's moving toward his closet, stumbling into a pair of jeans as he yanks out a duffel bag and pulls some pants off hangars, tugs out handful of shirts, grabs a few boxers and throws them all in.

"I think – toothbrush. I have a spare. And deodorant? We can, just –" he leans toward the bathroom, but she's grabbing his wrist, staring at him with dark, fathomless eyes, and suddenly it hits him, suddenly he understands. "Oh," is all he can murmur. It's not the combs and the soap. It's cash, fake IDs, used cars ditched roadside. The knowledge tightens in a band around his chest – he's not equipped for this, has barely the slightest notion of what he's doing.

She sees it in him; he's not fast enough to hide it. She's suddenly quiet, gentle, still just in her bra and jeans and no shoes, so much smaller than usual. She moves into his space, so slowly, brushes her lips over his in absolution, rests her forehead on his cheek for the second time this night. "You've done so much for me. Let me do this for you. Go back to sleep."

"I can't," he whispers back, the knowledge clogging his throat. There are only these truths for him: Someone wants Kate dead. Kate wants him. He cannot let her walk out his door alone. "I can't."


	2. Chapter 2

She drives.

"Are you sure?" he'd asked her before she'd taken the keys. He still doesn't know what the past day has held for her, only that she almost died, only that she showed up at his door soaked and on the verge of tears. She'd simply nodded.

He taps at his American Airlines app, booking two tickets on the six am flight out to California. Now that Beckett and he are leaving town, he's fairly convinced it's an unnecessary precaution, but he'll never sleep thinking of Alexis and his mother in the loft, in Manhattan, on the East Coast.

The ticket confirmation goes through just as Beckett pulls up outside her apartment. She draws in a deep breath, her fingers clutching the smooth metal of the door handle. The reason for her hesitation curls suddenly, horribly in his stomach: she doesn't know when she'll be back here. They don't know when either of them will be back in the city.

When he'll see his daughter again.

He focuses his eyes on a hazy point down the street, breathes through the tight wash of pain. He's concentrating so hard on holding a steady pattern of inhales and exhales that he almost misses it.

She's starting to open the door, but he grabs the wrist that still lies on the center console, wraps his fingers hard around her bones. "Wait," he bites out.

Her eyes snap to him, then immediately start scanning the street. "What is it?"

"There," he says. "Half a block away." There's a tall man leaning casually against the building, blending into the shadows and the rain, several doors away from her apartment.

It could be anyone.

It's nearly impossible to see in the dark and the distance and the rain, but there's a sharpness to the angle of his shoulders, an air of restrained power in the tight lines of his arms.

Beckett's jerks her hand off the door handle. Before he can say a word, she's pulling away from his grip, twisting the key, slamming the car into drive, stepping on the accelerator.

"Where're we going?" he murmurs. _Get her out_, the text had read, but what does that mean? They need – God, he doesn't know, can't calculate where is safe, where is _out_.

She shrugs in response, her brow furrowed, jaw clenched.

"We could – we should call Gates. Or Ryan. Esposito." The dark look in her eyes doesn't change. "We could do a private detail." _Get her out_, but maybe just out of her apartment, out of the standard confines of her life, maybe not out of the Manhattan, out of New York. Maybe they don't actually have to upend everything.

"How would we know who to trust?" she asks, voice low, hollow. "The more people we pull in…"

"The more dangerous it is," he finishes. "But there – there are people we can trust. At the twelfth." He closes his eyes as soon as he hears the words from his mouth – the man she thought she could trust implicitly was so entangled in this mess; he can't, won't sit here and tell her there's anyone they can believe in unconditionally.

"Not worth the risk."

He hums in the back of his throat, agreeing. Not worth it, not worth the potential of another bullet brushing along the edge of her heart.

"To anyone," she adds. He flinches away from it, from the knowledge that it's not just her life. It's anyone willing to protect her. To stand with her.

She glances over at him darkly, but he won't, he can't; it's impossible for him to even consider leaving her. "So. Where to?" is all he can finally offer, hoping she won't fight him, hoping she'll leave it.

"North. For now. Call your family."

He calls his mother first, gives her the flight number, tells her he's emailing her the boarding pass. Asks her to watch out for Alexis.

"Richard, I don't understand," she says, a thin edge of dread sharp on her tone. "What have you gotten yourself into?"

He shakes his head, knowing she can't see him. "And I need you to call Andrew Hall over at Mellon. I don't care what he has to trade or liquidate, but I need a hundred thousand dollars in cash in Esposito's hands before you leave for California."

He hears Beckett's sharp inhalation beside him. His mother groans. "Richard," she says. "I don't know what you're doing, but don't. Just come home. Or come with us. We can all go together."

He ignores her. "Use the money in the account for whatever you need." He pauses, presses his fingers to his temple. "I have to call Alexis now. I love you."

She's going to say something else and his eyes are already burning, his heart already thumping hard against his sternum, so he thumbs the call off.

"Castle," Beckett says, her voice thick, but he shakes his head, can't do it, not when he's about to rip apart his daughter's post-graduate celebration, his daughter's world.

The phone rings and rings. He's not sure what to do if she doesn't answer. He can't leave Beckett. Can't bring Beckett near Alexis. Can't let Alexis stay in New York any longer. Panic curls in his chest. This will never be a choice he is equipped to make.

"Dad," she's suddenly saying into the phone, a little breathless, a little worried. He can hear the thump of a strong bass in the background, the hum and murmur and shout of her friends.

The words he needs to say lodge in his throat, snagging in a messy tangle in his larynx.

"Are you okay?" she asks. The background sounds get quieter. "I can come home. It's not a big deal at all, I can swing by the new Sprinkles, I think it's twenty-four hours now, and get us some cupcakes, and we can even watch those awful movies with all the blood you love so much."

"You have to go to California," he chokes out, shoving up the words up through his ever-closing throat. "You have to go home. Pack. Meet your grandmother."

"What?" she breathes, already confused, already hurt. "What do you mean?

"I'm going to be out of town for a while. You – I don't know how much longer I'll have my phone on me." A phone call could get them caught. A phone call could get Beckett killed.

"Dad, stop it," she says, the words across the start of a sob. "Stop it now. I don't know what you think you're doing, but you can't. You can't."

It's his earlier words to Beckett reflected back at him. He presses his palm against his mouth, tries to hold in, tries to press himself back together. He can see, out of the corner of his eye, Beckett's knuckles tight on the wheel, the blood drained out of them.

"Come _home_," Alexis gasps, frenetic, desperate.

There are no words he can say to her, nothing he can give her that will make this okay. In the end, he can only refract a jagged piece of her valedictorian speech back at her. "I'll be with you no matter what." He realizes, as he says it, how hollow it rings. Despite all his other faults, he's always been there for his daughter, a steady, dependable presence, and no matter what happens later, he's taking that particular _always_ away.

The phone echoes with a pained, indrawn breath. "You don't get to _do_ that," Alexis moans, and he can hear the darkness in her voice. He can't tell what Beckett can hear but it's something, because she's swinging the car to the side of the road, slamming on the breaks, her fingers still clenched tight around the steering wheel.

He glances at his partner. Her eyes are red-rimmed, shining. "Alexis," he says into the phone, "I love you. I'll call you later. I promise I'll be careful."

He hangs up, turns the phone off, grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, suddenly unable to face Beckett, unable to face anything.

"It's not too late," he hears her whisper, her voice ricocheting quietly through the car.

He presses harder with his hands, creates starbursts of color at the edges of the darkness. "You know it is," he grits out. "Don't make me have this fight again, Beckett. Not now."

"Okay. I'm sorry. Okay." He shifts, curls in on himself as she pulls the car back out and starts driving quietly through the rain. He tries to tamp down on the grief, rollicking in waves through his body, not only for his mother and for Alexis but for _her_, for _them_, for the night they should have spent with their limbs tangled together, the morning they should have spent drinking coffee, wrapped in nothing but each other.

She drives in silence, checking her rearview constantly, zagging from highway to highway until exiting onto a back road. The rain lets up, melting away to a cool mist as she navigates over dark switchbacks before swerving into the lot of a nondescript motel where a ramshackle neon light announces vacancy.

He feels empty, hollowed out by grief. Alexis will be home by now, packing. Alexis will have been crying since he spoke to her on the phone. Alexis will be safe.

"Where are we?" he asks, the words scraped raw across his throat.

"Washingtonville," she murmurs, glancing at the letters beneath the lurid neon glow. "The Crazy 8."

This call will be easier, he tells himself, clicking his phone back on, but of course there's six voicemails waiting for him. He thumbs over to them, a stupid, frivolous hope catching in his chest – they just need one from Smith, telling them she's fine, she's safe, no need to flee. But there's two from his mother, four from Alexis. He inhales, exhales, dials Esposito's number, flicks the phone to speaker.

Esposito picks up on the first ring. "You gonna tell me why I haven't been able to reach you or Beckett and why your mother says she has a hundred thou in cash to give me ASAP?"

Castle ignores the first part of the question. "Can you bring it to the Crazy 8 Motel in Washingtonville after you get it?"

"What the hell?" Esposito barks. "Look, you _know_ I have your back. What's going on?"

"We shouldn't stay on the line," Beckett says. He can hear Esposito's sharp, relieved exhale at the sound of her voice. "We also need a burner phone. Fakes IDs – passports, if you can swing 'em, but I know those are harder." And then her eyes, worried, assessing, flick over Castle's face. "And two guns."

"Beckett," Esposito breathes.

"It might be dangerous. If you see a tail, forget it." She pauses, swallows. "This isn't an obligation, Javi."

"Crazy 8 in Washingtonville. Got it."

"We owe you," she bites out.

"Stay safe and we'll call it even," he says.

"Be careful," she murmurs. She thumbs the phone off, drops it into Castle's lap like it burns her.

"Two guns," Castle says, flatly.

"Let's go." She jerks her car door open. He tries to swallow the frustration, the hurt and sadness sizzling through his muscles, but it coils tightly in him, has him throwing himself out of the car in time to see her knees buckle as she rises, her body tip forward. She grabs the roof of the sedan with one hand and the frame of the door with another, but he can see the strain in her muscles, the shocky tremble through her arms.

He sprints around the hood, hooks a hand under her elbow. She shivers, turns it into a shake to get his fingers off her, be he won't let go, not now, not again.

"What is it?" he breathes, crowding closer, turning her into him and settling her over, against the rear door of the sedan.

There's a sudden, desperate noise in the back of her throat, a shadow across her face, and oh, _oh_, her back slumped against a sedan and his body leaning over hers in the chilled dead of night, how _stupid_ could he possibly be. He's not going to move her now, though, not when anything could be wrong with her, not when he's not sure she doesn't have a ruptured spleen, that she's not going to bleed out in front of him, quietly, this time, with not even the silent rush of crimson to show for it. Her eyes are closed.

"Kate, _what is it_?"

She shakes her head, breathes for a moment, finally opens her eyes. They're clearer, now. "Just a little sore," she says. "Some bruises. The usual."

"The usual," he says, too serious. He can't help her make fun of something that he doesn't know, can't know, because she hasn't told him.

"Just an interesting day followed by a long drive," she murmurs, flippant.

He stares, eyes locked to hers, his throat aching.

She must see it - she straightens up into him, gradually, carefully, brushes her hand over his shoulder in apology. "Come on," she says, "we'll talk inside."


	3. Chapter 3

She hadn't blinked when she'd asked the bored teenager behind the desk for one room, hadn't flinched when he'd told her he hoped she and her husband would enjoy their stay, hadn't hesitated to walk inside, flick on a switch, and sink down onto the drab bedspread. She gingerly stretches her arms and arcs her back, exhaling sharply.

He deposits the duffel bag in the corner of the room, feeling a quiet rush of shame that she has absolutely nothing, nothing but the clothes, still vaguely damp with rainwater, plastered to her body. He stands awkwardly, watching her as she slowly draws her legs up, crossing them under her on the bed.

She smiles thinly at him, smoothes her hand over the space next to her in invitation. "I promise not to be too rough," she says.

He supposes he can't begrudge her borrowing his coping mechanism. "I'm more worried about whatever mutant bedbugs might be on that thing," he says as he settles down next to her, shifts to face her. "I'm going to be lying awake in terror all night."

She sighs, wraps her fingers tightly around her shins. His comment was too close. There's not enough that's funny about this situation.

He waits for her. He likes to think he's an expert at it by now.

"We need two guns because I don't have mine. Because I resigned," she says, starting, near as he can figure, at the end.

"Beckett," he breathes. Already, already this story is twining around his throat, cutting off his air, already this story is not one he's sure he can manage, and she's barely even told him anything.

"Gates had already suspended Esposito and me. We found the guy. Cole Maddox. I didn't tell Gates. Dragged Espo with me to his hotel. Found Montgomery's files, but I wasn't being careful enough, and he got the drop on us and went to the roof. I followed him." She pauses, a spark of something catching in her eyes, sadness or fury or regret. "He got away."

"How?" he growls, because it's suddenly vital that he know everything, that she gives him all the pieces of her story.

"We fought. He was –" she licks her lips, glances away briefly – "he was stronger than me. Better trained. He left me dangling from the roof. Ryan caught me as my fingers slipped. He'd told Gates. They came with backup."

"God," he chokes out, his eyes stinging, his chest aching with the sudden slam of knowledge, the burning realization of just how close he'd come to losing her again, a heartbeat of time and the strength of Ryan's hands the only things that dragged her back to him. So close, too close to someone from the 12th knocking on his door instead of Beckett, someone with sympathetic eyes and somber words that would keep him from ever being whole again.

He drops his head, focuses on the faded paisley of the bedspread, forces himself to keep breathing despite the heartache of all their _almosts_. She ducks her chin to catch his line of vision. "I remember – his hands were around my neck, and I couldn't breathe, my vision started tunneling grey, and still, all I could think about was a name. All I needed was the name of the man behind it all."

He can't help it, can't stand it, lurches forward at her, skims his fingers lightly along the column of her throat. He can see it now, the darkening capillaries, the spindling veins underneath where Maddox's fingers must have pressed down. Her breathing quickens; he can feel her rapid exhalations across his nose, but she lets him touch, lets him drag his hands along the sharp angles of her vertebrae, the smooth lines of her neck, the arc of her trachea, still dragging air in and pushing it out, somehow not crushed under the pressure of a man's violent fingers.

"When I was clinging to the roof, when I suddenly realized I wasn't getting back up – the name wasn't enough anymore. The name didn't mean – I might have thought it was enough to die for, but I didn't want to live for it."

His hands keep skimming her neck, then trip down, reach a recently-risen welt on her collarbone. He keens, low, in the back of his throat, needing to see it, see her, understand what's happened to her through the map scrawled over her body. She takes her hands off her shins, lifts them in permission, supplication. He tugs her jacket off her, carefully, but she can't avoid a quiet flinch as she rotates her shoulder back to let him tug the damp leather away.

He can feel his breath pushing out of his lungs in sharp, staccato bursts as he unbuttons her shirt, needing to see the story written on her skin, the story she's given as much as she can with her words (her words will never be enough, now, he will always need more of her). He gets to the bottom button, his fingers stumbling over the fabric, faltering over the smooth skin of her stomach, and it's the second time in a matter of hours he's done this but the first time he's really seeing, his vision blurred but not entirely clouded, now, by a haze of lust and love and adulation. He pushes the edges of the shirt aside, sees a darkening bruise over the bottom of her rib, a red weal just at her hip; he sees, now, what he couldn't before.

The mark blazes an angry trail down, over her hip and under her jeans, so he unbuttons them, pushes her back onto the bed, tugs them down her thighs and then off her legs, needing more, needing all of her. The denim pulls at her, clings to her skin, but she lies there silently, staring up at him with dark eyes that radiate understanding.

There's another bruise darkening on the inside of her knee, the skin just starting to shadow, and he hovers over, leans his face close, brushes his lips over the injury. "You," she breathes out, voice thin, thready, and he will never, ever get sick of hearing that word from her lips. "I wanted to live for you."

He drops his head onto her thigh, overcome by it again, overcome by her, lifts a hand up and drags it over the rough lace of her bra, the cool skin of her stomach, down over the damp cotton of her underwear. "I don't want to hurt you," he murmurs into her knee.

"You won't hurt me," she says, shifting, squirming so that her legs fall further apart.

"The day you've had…" he starts.

She lifts a heel and uses it to kick him gently on his shoulder, drapes her calf over his shoulder, and his hand is still resting between her legs and he can feel the quivering of her stomach, the desperate need that sets her muscles vibrating and transfers over to him, makes him gasp into her leg. "_I_ will hurt _you_ if you don't get _moving_," she breathes.

He laughs against her leg, circles his hand lightly, gently at the very bottom of her stomach. She hums, low and frustrated, in the back of her throat, nudges the bottom of his scapula with the foot that still hangs there. He lets his fingers dance up, strokes the soft skin around her navel, feathers a light kiss on the inside of her lower thigh.

"Castle," she exhales. "Stop _teasing_." She props herself up on her elbows, sees something in him that has her tilting forward, folding in half to grab the lapels of his shirt, dragging him forcibly up to her and then leaning back, still clutching him, pulling him so that he's lying over her in the bed. He can feel the heat of her skin through the fabric of his shirt; her hands rove up and down his sides, smoothing over his flanks as her teeth scrape along his jawbone.

He can't help but groan as she wraps her legs around his waist, the heat of her thighs burning through the denim of his jeans, their hips clashing as she arcs up and he rolls down, and then her hands are on his belt and she's murmuring _too many clothes_ against his lips and he forgets about everything but the warmth of her mouth, the fast-burning fire of her body.

* * *

She's tangled against him when they wake in the thin morning light, and it's so right and so wrong all at once. The planes and slants of her body nudge against him: the sharp arc of her ankle bone at his calf, the jut of her elbow into his stomach, the curve of her nose against his collarbone –- the way she's pressed into him, angles jarring against angles, is everything he's ever wanted.

But the sheets are pilled and threadbare. There's the darkness around her throat from when a man tried to crush her windpipe. He can't be sure whether she's naked because she wants to be or because she has absolutely nothing.

He shifts, feeling it acutely, the pull of desire and wash of pleasure at her naked body, the sting of heartache that they are here now, a nowhere hotel, that every day will draw them further away from home, from the morning after she deserves.

She must feel him move; she hums into his collarbone, scrapes her teeth over his skin, and oh, oh that's no good. That's too good. "Morning," she whispers, her voice rocky with sleep.

It shoots straight to his core and he has to still himself, suppress a groan. "Hey," he murmurs, brushing his hand along the top of her head as she curls closer, contracts herself into his torso.

He tries not to read into it. When they'd been in his loft, when she'd pulled him into his bedroom, she'd been commanding, the lithe length of her body over his, pressing him into the bed, pinning his wrists, holding him down. Last night – she was still everything from every fantasy he's ever entertained, but she'd pulled him over her and kept him there, and while he hadn't noticed at the time, he can't help but realize now that she's balled into herself against him. Like she's making herself a smaller target.

She can't be consciously aware of it – her mouth is moving lightly against his chest, her hand starts stroking down his side, and she's making a light, nearly-inaudible humming noise in the back of her throat.

He lifts his head, squints over the pillows to look at her father's watch, propped up on her nightstand. "It's nine," he murmurs, trailing his fingers down her bicep.

She arcs, unfurling her body slowly, wincing slightly as her legs stretch out and her back straightens. She blinks muzzily up at him, smiles languorously. "Too bad," she husks, leaning into him again, brushing her lips along the stubble of his chin. "I had plans for you this morning."

He groans, dips his chin to lightly kiss the tip of her nose. Maybe he was imaging it, earlier – maybe she always sleeps curled up tightly. He's so used to reading every rise and fall of her lips, ever swing and hitch of her step in the precinct, but she's a foreign creature in bed, exotic and unfamiliar, and he can't let himself think he can understand every twitch of her body in this context with the same expertise.

"When do you think Esposito'll get here?" he asks, reaching out to run his fingers along the plane of her stomach. If they're fast…

"No, Castle," she says, her voice lilting, teasing, a little breathy. "I'm getting in the shower." He opens his mouth to suggest where they could go with that, but she cuts him off. "_Alone_. And then you can get ready, and we can try to make some kind of plan."

She brushes her hand over his chest, rolls over to get out of bed. He can't stop the pained noise that reverberate through his throat when he sees her back. Her skin is a violent, livid purple across her left shoulder blade, just over her left hip.

"Hmm?" she murmurs, turning her head back at him, following the trail of his eyes to her shoulder. "Oh." She shakes her arms gently, rotates her neck in a slow circle, catches his gaze again. He knows he's not doing a great job at schooling the stricken look off his face from the way she smirks at him. "Did you miss the part where I said I fought with a highly-trained sniper?"

"Kate," he whispers, trying not to sound too raw. Every mark across her skin is a visceral reminder of her mortality, and now, in the clear light of day, his writer's brain is churning in a way it wasn't before, replaying the ways she would have gotten every bruise, every scrape.

She stands, walks around the bed to get to the bathroom, reaches out a hand to wrap around his foot on the way. "Stop thinking so hard, Castle."

He can't control his brief, leering smile – despite his worry over her, he woke up with her in his bed and now she's walking around the room, comfortably, gloriously naked. "That's not the on—hey!" She's flicked the arch of his foot in a way that's shooting spindles of pain all the way through to his toes.

"Be good," she says in a throaty voice that invites him to be everything but good. "Espo might get here soon. I have to shower."

"Can I at least watch?" he asks, falling back into the bed, stretching his arms over his head and letting his eyes travel slowly over her body.

She firmly shuts the bathroom door in response.


	4. Chapter 4

He closes his eyes and relaxes back against the pillows, listens to the gentle sound of the shower, tries to imagine anything other than the stream of water sluicing over the planes and angles of Beckett's body. It doesn't work.

After a moment, he decides movement is the better option - he pulls on boxers and jeans, turns on his phone, sends off a quick text to Esposito to tell him they're in room 32. There are eleven voicemails now. He can't help but click over to them. Three from Martha. Nine from Alexis. Somehow his thumb is suddenly hovering over the most recent message, and he's hitting play and listening to his daughter's voice, breathy and strained:

"Hi, Dad. We're at the airport now. We're about to get on the plane to California, so, um, if you get this, my phone'll probably be off. I just – can you let me know you're okay? I want to be understanding. I guess – I think - I understand. But maybe – it's not too late. For you to come with us." Her voice breaks. "I just really miss you," she says, and then there's a too-definite click to silence.

He needs to call. Needs to tell her he's okay. But his throat is clogged and he's having trouble swallowing, unable to draw in all the air he wants. He taps out a text through blurry vision – _We're fine and safe. Have fun in California, and don't worry. I love you. _

He turns off the phone and sits there, staring blindly at the blank screen, inhaling, counting to three, exhaling, until his breathing finally slows into a steady rhythm, until the dampness from the tears dries and he's left feeling hollow, feeling empty.

"Oh, Castle," he hears, a quiet whisper from the doorway to the bathroom, and he tilts to see her standing there with wet hair, a towel wrapped around her torso, ending just at the top of the smooth length of her thighs. He doesn't know how she can tell so much just from the slump of his shoulders.

"M'okay," he murmurs, his voice sounding too heavy even to his own ears.

She knots the towel deftly, walks over to stand next to the bed, tugs him against her so that his shoulder is pressed into her stomach and his head is resting at the jut of her ribcage. Her arms wrap around his far bicep, drawing him into her, and beneath the scratchy terrycloth he can hear the reassuring, constant thump of her heart.

He's not sure how long he sits, his body canted into hers, her fingers tracing quiet circles up from his elbow to his shoulder and back down, but finally he feels some of the grief leave him, melt into a wonder at the presence of the woman standing warm and solid and alive beside him. "Just - texted Espo," he says in explanation, finally able to tilt his head up to meet her gaze.

She stares down at him with too much understanding. "They get on the plane?"

"Yeah," he says, the word nearly hidden on his exhale.

She's opening her mouth to say something, her arms still warm and steady and gentle around him, but a loud rap on the door has her jumping, looking wildly at the dresser the room for a heartbeat – for her gun, he thinks, a gun she doesn't have. "Stay here," she growls, walking over to look through the peephole, but then she's sighing in relief and unchaining the deadbolt and letting an exhausted Esposito, carrying a decent-sized duffle bag, into their room.

He grins tiredly at her. "Nice outfit, Beckett. You dress up special for me?"

"Shut up, Espo," she says, none of the usual bite in her voice.

Castle suddenly realizes he's not wearing a shirt, and Esposito's smirk has as much to do with the two of them together in their states of undress as it does with Beckett parading around in a towel. "Congrats," the detective says, a layer of sincerity underneath the omnipresent snark.

Castle's not sure where she'll go with it, but Beckett just quirks a half smile at him, murmurs "thanks," and collects her clothes. Even from the bed, he can see they're dirty, stiff from the rain and the long drive, and she furrows her brow in consternation as her fingers clench around the fabric.

"Just," Castle says, and this would _not_ be awkward at all if Esposito wasn't standing in the doorway, staring at them with a too-knowing smile. He shifts off the bed, takes out boxers and a t-shirt from his bag, and passes them to her.

"You need me to step outside?" Esposito asks, his tone implying that she'll be doing more than just getting dressed.

She yanks the clothes from Castle's hands, shoots Esposito a glare, steps into the bathroom. Castle uses the opportunity to tug a shirt over his head, tamping down on the worry that flutters along the edges of his consciousness at Esposito's tense stance.

"You okay?" he finally asks, but the cop just shakes his head and remains, silent and stoic, near the door.

Castle can't stop the pang of arousal deep within him as he sees Beckett emerge from the bathroom, his boxers slung low on her hips, his shirt hanging off her thin frame, and for a brief second he can't help but curse Esposito for showing up so early.

There's a couple rickety chairs in the corner of the room. Esposito pulls them both out, sits on one while Beckett folds onto the other and Castle perches on the bed.

She opens her mouth to say something, but she's cut off. "I was gonna try and convince you to come back," Esposito says. "I had all my arguments planned out - how much safer Manhattan is, the kind of protection we could get you – hell, even Castle's family." Castle swallows at that, and Esposito shoots him a look that's not unkind.

"You don't want to convince us anymore," Beckett says, voice flat, like she already knows the punchline.

"Ryan called me, middle of last night. Demming called him because he was at the 12th late and noticed a report about a routine attempted B & E – he only paused at it because the owner listed was _you_, Beckett." Castle feels his chest start to constrict. "Cop that was on it said it has been deprioritized, nothing of value was taken and it was just paperwork to file, but Demming tried to call you, make sure you didn't need anyone to swing by. When he couldn't reach you, he got ahold of Ryan, who went straight to your apartment."

"How bad?" Beckett asks, her voice not even really a question, like she's been expecting this. Castle supposes she has, wonders why she couldn't have prepared him for it, too, why every piece of new information socks him in the gut, bowls him over.

"It's a wreck, Beckett. Tables and chairs and couches overturned, pillows ripped apart – not sure what's missing, but your computer's definitely not there anymore."

She blinks, swallows. "There's a makeshift murder board on the living room windows. A box of files under my bed. Maybe – someone should check and see if they're still there."

Esposito nods, tapping out a text before he continues. "Thing is, Ryan talked to one of the neighbors, who said he'd called the cops when he'd heard some noises and saw a man wearing a hood and dark sunglasses leaving your apartment."

"So why was it processed as a routine attempt?" Castle asks.

Esposito snaps, nods. "I don't know what's going on. I don't know if anyone went by there, or who talked to who, or how this whole thing fits together. But I do know there's a very limited number of people you can trust, Beckett."

She sighs, looking suddenly so very tired. "I know," she says, voice low. "You heard from Gates yet?" Esposito shakes his head, looking supremely uncomfortable. "You talk to Ryan?" He starts to answer, but she cuts him off. "About anything besides the break in."

"No," he says.

She reaches up, pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, takes a deep breath. "It was my fault," she murmurs. "You trusted me, you trusted me unquestioningly, and I did it all wrong."

Esposito shrugs. "No," he starts, but she stares at him with red-rimmed eyes and he changes tacks. "Look, it doesn't matter. I got your back. No matter what."

"I never wanted to put you in this position."

"Wouldn't want it to be anyone else," Esposito replies quickly, then shrugs a short apology as his eyes flick over her. "If you'd told me about the wardrobe malfunction I would have tried to figure something out."

"Castle Chic is the next big thing," Castle murmurs. He gets a muted glare from both of them for that.

"Not a priority," Beckett says, glancing from Esposito to the duffle sitting at his feet.

He lifts the bag, unzipping a section of it. "I met up with Martha at two am – arranged to have some cops with them until their plane took off, and security's going to meet them when they land, just to cover our bases. There's a hundred thou in this duffle. More won't be an issue - you have the offshore account that'll be hard to trace. I couldn't swing passable enough passports, but here's licenses."

"Samuel Chesterton from Illinois," Castle mutters incredulously. It's a decent license. It has a picture nearly identical to his current one. "Really?"

"Callie Chesterton, also from Illinois," Beckett says, looking up from her own ID and shooting Esposito a glare that promises imminent doom.

"Run," Castle whispers at Esposito, whose eyes flick briefly around the room, possibly checking the potential escape routes.

"Look, I figured it would just be easier, with you two traveling together and everything," he says. At Beckett's glare, he adds, "Also, I thought it would be a little funny."

"I don't mind at _all_," Castle says smugly.

Esposito sinks a little further into his chair, reaches into his pocket and pulls out two battered gold bands and a ring with a tiny row of inlaid diamonds.

"I absolutely _know_ you are not serious," Beckett growls, sounding almost like her old self. He can nearly picture them back in the precinct, if he squints and looks at the whole scene sideways and forgets about the drab motel room, except that Beckett's hair is damp and her feet are bare and she's wearing nothing but his boxers and his too-large t-shirt.

Esposito, however, has quieted, stilled, suddenly radiating just how very serious he is. "I just - I don't know what they're looking for. But until you can come home, I thought – anything to shake up the situation a little. A married couple from Illinois might pass more under the radar, might not pop quite as quickly with whoever's looking for you."

She sighs, reaches out and grabs the rings from his palm, tapping his finger with her knuckle gently as she withdraws, an odd kind of thanks. "No, this is good. I wouldn't have thought of it, but it's – it's an easy cover."

"I won't mind practicing _at all_," Castle adds. It's a halfhearted attempt to draw them all out of it, and nobody smiles, but Beckett' eyes lighten just a fraction.

"Burner phone," Esposito says, passing a chunky Motorola from his pocket. He reaches into the duffel, emerging with two sleek, identical Glocks. "They're pretty standard," he says. "But not bad for short notice." Castle doesn't ask, doesn't want to know, how he got the fake ids and the burner phone and two handguns in the middle of the night.

Beckett sighs, shoulders loosening a fraction of an inch, as she wraps her hand around the gun and passes the other one to Castle. It feels cold, oddly heavy, the weight of the trust she's placing in him. "It's perfect," she murmurs. "This is…" she trails off, shrugging, glancing down at her lap. In one hand, she clutches the severe contours of a handgun, in the other, a pair of battered wedding rings.

"We owe you," Castle tries to say, but it sounds so empty, so hollow; it's such little thanks for their one current lifeline to Manhattan.

"Stay safe and we'll call it even," Esposito says.

"You want a Ferrari?"

He grins. "When you get back to New York, you can loan me your car for a week."

Beckett doesn't engage, just sits there, staring down, her eyes locked on a point just past her knees. She finally lifts her gaze, stares straight at Esposito. "You should go. I don't want – I don't want you more tangled up in this than you already are."

Esposito sighs, nods.

Beckett turns to Castle, and he can already see in her eyes everything she wants to say. "Don't," he says.

"Castle," she whispers.

He leans forward off the bed, uncurls her hand that's clenched around the rings and takes the three bands of metal from her. He keeps his grip on her hand, and she makes a low noise of protest when he guides the engagement ring onto her finger. "You're my witness, Esposito," he says, pushing the wedding ring on next. They're both a little too loose, she could lose them if she's not careful, but it's the best of a bad situation. He stares seriously at her. "We can't break up the Chestertons," he says. "We haven't even given them a running start."

She huffs out a breath, takes her hand back and flexes her fingers uncomfortably. Castle decides that he might as well put his own ring on, since he's fairly certain she won't be doing it any time soon. It pinches. "I didn't think to bring champagne," Esposito says. "Or wedding cake."

"We'll accept to the rings as an temporary alternative," Castle says. Beckett is glaring at both of them, but underneath her veneer of anger is an icy, deadly solemnity. She wants him going home with Esposito.

"Espo," she starts.

He cuts her off, shrugging slightly as he stands. "Sorry, Beckett. You know I'd do anything for you, but I'm with Castle on this one. You can't tell me, if your situation was reversed, you'd leave him."

"That's _different_," she hisses.

"I'm still in the room," Castle says, trying to stay jovial. "And we've only been married for about three minutes, Mrs. Chesterton. You can't keep trying to ditch me so soon."

She doesn't answer, but he sees the acceptance in her long exhale as she walks Esposito to the door, bumping her shoulder into his. "Don't get tangled up in this. You or Ryan."

Esposito rolls his eyes. "Yeah, okay."

"More than you have to, anyway."

"Sure thing, Beckett." He glances back toward Castle, pinches his fingers together, holds up his hand in a _feed the birds _motion. Castle steps forward, taps his hands up, tries not to feel any finality in the ridiculous gesture. "Be careful," Esposito says, and then he's walking away and they're left with only a bag of money and two guns and a pair of old wedding rings. They're left with only each other.


	5. Chapter 5

She grabs the Motorola off the table after Esposito's gone and stalks, clutching it, to the other side of the room. A total change from how she was when she was standing in a towel, pressing his body into her as she ran her fingers over his arm. She must have really believed he'd leave her. Go home with Esposito, abandon her in the drab motel room to fend for herself.

He tries to formulate words, tries to figure how to tell her that he won't leave her, will never leave her willingly again, but then she's pressing the phone to her ear and murmuring a quiet "Hey, Dad," and stepping into the bathroom, shutting the door firmly behind her.

He can't make out the words, but he can hear her voice, low and calm and reassuring, echoing through the door. He sinks into the chair she recently vacated, closes his eyes, and lets it anchor him, the steady lift and fall of her voice, the easy pauses, the smooth cadence of her speech.

When she emerges, she seems softer, the line of her jaw a little looser, the angle of her shoulders slightly more relaxed. "My dad says thanks," she offers, her face smooth, expressionless. He knows from her tone that this is the only apology she'll offer.

He stands, walks over to her, gently curls one hand at her elbow and the other around her back. "Anything for his daughter," he whispers, brushing his lips over the crown of her head, tugging her closer, so that the front of her body is just a breath away from his, so that he can soak in the warmth and life of her.

"It's not that I don't want you," she murmurs, the words rumbling against his clavicle. "You know that, right?"

He squeezes his fingers around her elbow, keeps his mouth pressed lightly against the top of her forehead. "I know. I understand." And he does – it's the same impossible choice that he would want her to make, her comfort for his, her safety for his, and it's neither of their faults that they are in a place, now, where their most fundamental desires keep clashing against one another. He just wants to be with her. She just wants him to be safe.

She pulls away first, sighing softly, stepping back to pick up her dirty jeans and shirt. "We should probably go," she says.

"You don't think you'll be presentable in my boxers?" he murmurs, smiling.

"Mmm. Not really the kind of low profile statement we should be making." He starts to cobble together a retort about profiles and the kind of statements he'd like to make, but she thumps him soundly in the side. "Focus, Castle. Come on. I'll let you buy a new outfit for me."

He gapes. "You tell me to focus and then you say _that_?"

* * *

She winds north through the back roads for over an hour, through small towns and fields and woods. Finally, they drive past a strip of stark, industrial shops, right past what seems like an ideal used car lot, a rundown building with an assortment of cars in various stages of deterioration.

"Thought you wanted to switch cars first?" he asks.

"Mmm," she hums, suddenly swerving onto a side road that winds into a quickly-thickening forest.

She drives for another mile in silence, her jaw tight, her knuckles clenched around the steering wheel, until she hits a sharp bend in the road at a dense part of the forest.

She glances over at him, assessing. "Hold on," she murmurs, and then she's twisting the wheel and _driving into the woods_ and he's letting out the least manly squeak to ever leave his body.

Twenty feet off the road, the hood is nudged into a tree and she's twisting the key, cutting the engine off like she drives his town car through a forest every day and he can't help but stare at her with some combination of admiration and horror. "Did you just drive my car _into a tree_?"

She smiles, but it's underpinned with a kind of hesitance that makes him swallow. "Just – wanted to make it a little harder to find. Just in case. Sorry. I'll buy you a new one."

"No, no need, really. That was kind of hot."

She rolls her eyes, but the hesitance leaves her expression. "Get the bags, Castle."

"Does this mean we have to _walk_?" he asks as he yanks the duffles out of the back.

"Castle, it's a mile and a half down paved roads."

He studies the car. "Oh, oh, can we _please _torch it? Do you have a lighter?"

"No."

"No to which question?"

"Just no."

He shifts, distributing the weight of the bags. "Maybe we could find a baseball bat and trash it. Oh, or a tree limb."

She holds out a hand. "Did someone sneak you an upper while I wasn't looking? Give me a bag."

"Just high on the thrill of the chase. The crash, I guess. And no, stop launching an assault on my manliness. You've done enough to me through damaging my car."

"I think we need to walk silently to the dealership."

"Contemplative silent like Thoreau in the woods, or stealth silent like sneaky ninjas?"

"Any kind of silent that starts now, Castle," she says, but as she speaks there's a smile in her voice and she falls into step directly beside him, her knuckle brushing against the back of his hand with every swing of every step.

* * *

He can't help but adore the delightfully creepy car dealership, at least until the moment the thickly-muscled thirty-something steps out of the dilapidated building and fixes his eyes on Beckett.

"I'm Terry," he says, reaching out a hand to her. He doesn't so much as glance at Castle.

"Lisa," she says, shaking his hand. He doesn't let go soon enough for Castle's taste.

Fake names on top of their fake names. He supposes the ramshackle building and rundown cars don't make it seem like it's the type of place that'll be checking IDs and issuing titles. "Carl," he says, tilting himself in front of Beckett, grasping Terry's fingers a little too firmly. "We're looking to buy a car. A cheap car. We have cash."

He's not sure how the guy'll take it, them wandering into the lot with two duffle bags, promising cash for a car, but he just shrugs, says, "Have a look around," and gestures expansively to the small array of sedans.

Beckett's suddenly, uncharacteristically quiet as they wander the lot, Terry trailing just behind them. She hangs a step back, lets her hair fall in a curtain over her face, stays quiet as he peruses the cars. He hones in on a black '88 Taurus and gets the keys from Terry to see if the slightly battered car will start. Beckett stays standing just to the right of the driver's side wheel. Terry sidles up to her a little too casually. Castle holds his breath to make out their conversation.

"Hey, sweetie."

Beckett hums an unintelligible response, doesn't spin on a heel and kick the idiot's ass for calling her _sweetie_. Castle feels his throat tighten – is she having a panic attack? Does she have some kind of internal injury that's only just now making itself known?

"Couldn't help but notice your bruises," Terry says, indicating to her neck. "Your husband like to smack you around? He get a little rough with you sometimes?"

The car coughs to a start, and he's glad, it gives him a minute to breathe through it, to inhale around the stranger's thought of him wrapping his hands around Kate Beckett's neck and squeezing, squeezing hard enough to make her gasp for breath, hard enough to press those livid marks into her throat.

"M'fine," she murmurs, stepping away, closer to the car, and he finally, _finally _gets it. Everything now depends on their flying under the radar – her life, his life, their future – and there is nothing about Beckett that is unnoticeable. Perking up and giving the guy an attitude might make her more memorable, but he won't forget her anyway, the tall, gorgeous woman with the bruises around her throat. Even staying quiet and mumbling incoherent responses, there's nothing she can do to change that. She can tone it down, but she can't change the captivating, crackling energy that surrounds her, the pull that inevitably draws everyone's gazes to her.

She's so amazing at so many things, but passing under the radar will never be one of them.

A messy $1,000 is scrawled on the windshield of the car, and he reaches into the duffle bag that's sitting next to him to covertly count out the money. This isn't his usual price range of vehicle, and he thinks maybe he should try to haggle the price down, but he'd pay double just to get this guy away from Beckett as quickly as possible.

"We'll take it," he says, stepping out of the car with the cash, pressing the bills firmly into Terry's palm.

The other man, unfortunately, won't quite let it go. He grabs Beckett's wrist as she starts to walk around to the passenger seat. Castle feels the muscles in his biceps tense, but he presses his fingers together, forces himself to stand quietly for a moment, to let Beckett work it out. He can tell from the sharpness of her inhale just how frustrated she is.

"You don't need to go with him," Terry says. If he doesn't let go of Beckett's wrist soon, Castle's ready to confirm every one of his suspicions by punching him in the face.

"I do," Beckett says, her voice low, dangerous, as she yanks her hand away with enough strength that Terry stumbles back a step.

She stalks over to the passenger seat, throws the duffle bags from there into the back, slams the door violently. Castle slides in after her.

"Drive," she growls at him.

"You don't want to try to get a title?" Castle asks, even though he already knows the answer.

"This isn't the kind of place you get a title, Castle. Just _drive._"

He turns the key, and the engine slowly chugs to life. Terry stays watching as they pull back out onto the road. Castle can feel the man's eyes on the back of their car even after they're miles away, can feel the intensity of his gaze, cataloging them, internalizing them.

They're both silent as Castle winds north on the road, past the turnoff where they dumped his (far more maneuverable and comfortable) sedan.

"It's the damn bruises," she says out of the blue, brushing her hand over her neck. "He wouldn't have noticed so much…" she trails off, sighs. "He's going to remember us, now."

"It's not just the bruises, Kate," he says gently.

"Hmm?" she murmurs, still only partially paying attention, her gaze unfocused out the window.

"It's _you_," he says, reaching over to snag her hand. Her wedding ring is cold against him, makes his fingers trip over her knuckles. "You're not forgettable. With or without bruises."

She finally turns to face him, smiles a little wickedly. "You're not so forgettable yourself, Castle."

He sighs. "Not like _that_," he says, finally understanding how it might be frustrating to have someone constantly joking with you when you are _trying _to make a _point._

She doesn't stop smiling. "I know. I just mean – you make an impression too, you know. Without trying to. Probably even when you're trying not to, not that that's ever happened."

"We're doomed," he murmurs, but her expression doesn't darken like he thinks it might after the words tumble free.

"At least we're doomed together."


	6. Chapter 6

"It's bad enough that we're shopping for clothes at _Target_," Castle says as she picks up yet another pair of jeans. "You're really not even going to _look _at any of the dresses I found?"

"Castle, I thought we established that the point was to blend in. I can already tell that thing will barely cover my thighs," she replies, gesturing at the sundress he's currently ogling as she sorts through a rack of all-too-utilitarian shirts.

"You said I could buy you an outfit. Look," he says, rummaging through his pile of dresses. He's carting around fifteen or sixteen in an ever-growing stack draped over the side of their cart. He settles on a halter dress that for some reason he can't stop wanting on her right now. "It's Viking Purple!" He pauses, brain flipping through ancient Norse mythology.

"Think Minnesota," she murmurs, turning away from him to pull down a camisole.

He makes a small sound in the back of his throat. _You're perfect_, he wants to say, but he just manages to bite back the words. "See, Beckett. This is a practical dress. A _football _dress."

She finally deigns to glance it over. "It's not a football dress just because it's Minnesota Viking Purple, Castle."

He bounces a little on the balls of his feet, tries to look endearing as he holds the dress aloft. "This is the chosen one. No reneging on our deal. You'll destroy my fragile trust."

She hums a noise that he chooses to take as some kind of assent. "You need anything?" she asks. "I'm going to…" she gestures at the section of underwear.

Like he's going to walk away from _that. _"I'm good. The world is a dangerous place. Wouldn't want to leave your side."

She shakes her head, fondly, he decides to imagine. "Observation only," she warns.

He leers. "That's what I do best," he says, trailing after her.

* * *

She pulls off suddenly at a small cove of trees near a sheep farm, ten minutes north of Target, hopping out of the car, yanking the back passenger door open, and rooting through one of the large plastic bags of clothes.

"Um," Castle says.

"I can't drive in these clothes anymore. Cover me," she says.

"What?" he asks, glancing back at her, and then he's swiveling around to stare because she's shucking off her shirt _and then her bra _right next to a _public roadway. _It's uncomfortable, the combination of arousal and concern that washes over him, the lust at the sharp lines of her stomach beneath the arc of her chest, the worry at the livid bruises streaked underneath her ribs and over her hip, at her slight wince when she reaches into the car.

He tumbles out of the passenger seat as she clasps a silky navy contraption of a bra over her chest. "You're supposed to be _watching the road,_" she snaps at him, dragging a tight black shirt down over her head.

"Nobody's coming," he murmurs, although he's not really looking. He's sure he has a reason for being out here. A reason other than Beckett's breasts.

"Seriously?" he hears her say, and realizes he's still staring at her chest, now covered by a bra and shirt.

"Antenna," he manages, tearing his eyes away from her body to look into her supremely annoyed eyes. The radio's been crackling in and out, sometimes drifting into total static, and while it might be just that they're in a land where only cows live, something about the transmission makes him feel like they're having structural problems. He has no idea how long they'll spend in this car, but he knows that without music he'll start talking incessantly, and if he does that for stretches longer than forty-five minutes, Beckett will start twitching like she wants to maim him.

She keeps glaring at him, so he turns from her to focus his attention on the antenna. Sure enough, the thing is flopping precariously at half-mast, looking like it's a few decent-sized potholes away from falling off completely.

"Yeah, she's sort of –" he starts, but he stutters into silence as he turns to see what materials he has to keep the antenna from just snapping off. Beckett is standing there half _naked_, covered in nothing but a t-shirt and a pair of black, functional underwear.

"You know you've seen it all before, right?" she asks as she steps into a pair of khaki shorts.

He tries to answer, but his mouth is dry, his face is flushed, his brain is short-circuiting.

"Just - fixing the antenna," he stutters. She pulls the shorts over her hips, flicks the button closed. He can't help the disappointed sigh that escapes him.

He dives into the back, roots through their bags looking for anything sticky, emerges with the first-aid kit they'd thrown into the cart on their way to the check-out. He pulls out some band aids – there are worse temporary solutions, he decides – and busies himself with aligning the broken, jagged edges of plastic, carefully winding the band aids around so that they hold the antenna upright. He is not thinking about Beckett, standing in the grass by the side of the road, her left half framed by the cove of trees, her right by a pasture and a herd of grazing sheep and the clear midday cobalt sky, her long lithe legs utterly bare.

Despite his distraction, he manages to wrap the antenna so that it maintains a somewhat jaunty angle. "Look! I've found my new calling as a mechanic."

She walks up next to him, blinks at the antenna. He stares down at her legs, his stomach tightening: the curve of her thigh, the bruise on her knee, she's twisting him in knots. "Castle, this looks utterly ridiculous."

He swallows it all: his desire, his worry, the crushing love that threatens to run rampant up his throat and spill itself into words too heavy for the bright noon sun. "Beckett, shhh. You can't talk to it like that; it's _wounded_," he finally says.

She grins briefly up at him, but her attention's pulled by something down the road, the smooth purr of an approaching car, slowing as it nears them. A jet-black sedan. Out-of-state plates. Tinted windows.

He suddenly can't hear over the thundering of his pulse, the fear that spindles through his veins, contracting his muscles, stagnating his breath in his lungs. They're open, exposed; his gun's in the glove compartment and he's not sure where Beckett's is, and maybe he could lunge to the passenger seat and dive for his but that would absolutely attract even more attention, how _stupid _have they been, how _careless_. This is her _life _at stake and they're buying clothes at Target, stopping by the side of the road to change.

The car rolls by. He stares at the back of it until it disappears into the distance. When he turns back to Beckett, her face is pale, and her hand is gripping her gun so hard that her knuckles are white.

"Let's go," she murmurs, voice rough, low.

"Yeah," he says, trying not to let the panic scrape across his voice. "Let's go."

* * *

The map of the United States is spread across his thighs, stretching from the passenger door to brush against the steering wheel. The voice of some country singer warbles and crackles through the car – the antenna's better, now, but not all the way fixed.

"Never understood agoraphobia before now," he murmurs absently. The map is too large. His gaze keep stumbling along various roads, can't find anything to latch onto.

"Hmm?" Beckett murmurs, her eyes cutting briefly from the road to glance over at him.

"I don't even know where we are right now. Let alone where we should go. I miss my iPhone." He glances longingly at the duffle in the back.

"No, Castle. It's bad enough you still have it at all. We're not putting the SIM card or battery back in it. And we're just north of –" she sighs, shrugging, "civilization."

"Awesome," he says, his gaze tripping over the open spaces of upstate New York.

"Doesn't really matter where we go," she says. _Just pick a place_, she'd told him earlier, like they were playing some kind of game.

It's paralyzing, the vast expanse of the country spread from his legs to the dashboard, all the different white and green spaces, the blue veins of highways and red threads of smaller roads that could all lead to her bleeding out on the ground, another bullet shot through her chest.

She must glance over and see the look on his face, her tone eases, softens. "Really, Castle," she says. "I usually don't have to say this with you, but stop overthinking things."

He reaches a hand over, rests it on her leg, just above her knee, revels in the warmth and life of her leaching into his palm. "Sorry," he says, squeezing slightly, trying to put all the feeling into it that he can.

She shifts, her muscles tightening beneath him, and he can't help the coil of warmth that builds in his stomach. "Maybe west, for now," she finally offers. "I don't want to try crossing any borders with the IDs we have."

"Yeah. Okay." He doesn't want to go west. He wants the expanse of the ocean at his side, the vast stretches of possibility in the rollicking blue, the limitless escape of water.

"We can loop back around," she says, voice low. "Just – maybe leaving New York wouldn't be a bad thing."

Another boundary between them and Manhattan, even something as permeable as a state line. "Yeah," he agrees, again, feeling it, his chest tight with loss.

She drops a hand from the wheel, wraps her fingers around the hand that's resting on her knee, squeezes so tightly that bright pinpricks of pain dance up to his elbow, his tendons and ligaments and bones all tightening and bunching together. It helps, the cleansing wash of pain, crystallizes and clarifies: his kid isn't here but she's safe, Kate's beat up but she's alive, they're reeling, but they have each other, they still have each other.


	7. Chapter 7

He doesn't like the way the kid behind the desk is looking at him, the way his eyes keep flicking from the dark, shadowed bruises on Beckett's throat to Castle's hands. "One room?" he asks, a thread of anger underpinning his tone.

"Yeah," Beckett says, her voice silk over steel, daring him to say anything.

The kid lets up, doesn't even ask them for their names. She pays with a crumple of bills, takes the key, and stalks away without another word.

"I'll wear a turtleneck tomorrow," Beckett says gently to him as they step into the dingy room. He tosses their two bags in a corner, slumps down onto the bed, rubs his hand over his eyes.

He huffs a sigh. "Too warm," he murmurs.

She shrugs, the motion of her shoulders stiff, stilted. "It's making people notice us too much." He knows it's not just that. Knows that she notices his tension at the accusations, knows that she sees how quiet he gets at the thought of his hurting her.

He hums noncommittally, unsure what to say. She hovers near the corner of the room, next to the window, leaning lightly against the wall with her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes vaguely unfocused. All day, all he's wanted has been her, the press and heat and verve of her lithe body beneath him, but now that they're in the drab, dim motel room, the distance between them is suddenly vast, insurmountable.

"Just call, Castle," she says, glancing at his hand.

He's tapping his fingers against the burner phone. He didn't even realize it was sitting next to him, didn't realize his index finger was tattooing a steady beat against the metal shell. "We shouldn't use it that much," he says. He still feels it in his stomach, the tight knot of dread that coiled when the black sedan drove past them, the echo of the rush and roar of his pulse in his ears.

She arcs an eyebrow at him, silent, assessing, like she has this knowledge of his needs deep inside her, thrumming through her veins.

"Maybe if I keep it short?" he asks, feeling the yearning twist deep in his chest. His iPhone's stayed off, battery and SIM card in a separate bag. Anything – anything could have happened. He suddenly feels claustrophobic, trapped, the different kinds of panic pressing against him in the dark room, crumpling him inward with the force of it, with worry over his family, with terror for Beckett's life.

"Go on," she says.

His fingers start to trip over the slightly gluey buttons of the Motorola, but he pauses four numbers in. "You think they're watching her line?"

Beckett nods. "Could be. Probably."

He drops the phone back down to the bed.

At the look on his face she sighs, slumps down a little against the wall. "Have her call you back on a different line. Five seconds won't give them anything." He starts to shake his head. "Now," she says, still gentle, but some of the toughness back in her voice.

He dials. Presses the phone tightly to his ear. It rings once. Twice. He swivels to face the doorway, lets his eyes bump over the chipping white paint, the slightly-askew handle, the dark streak across the center of it.

"Hello?" he hears his daughter ask, tentative, hopeful.

"Alexis," he says, closing his eyes against the near-painful relief at the sound of her voice, strong and healthy, echoing into his ear.

"Oh thank god," she breathes, and then he can hear her shouting, _Gram, it's Dad! _"Hang on, just –" And then there's the click of a dial tone.

He closes the phone, stares down blankly at it, feeling Beckett's eyes burning into him. He doesn't pick his head up. He swallows down the dread.

A sharp trill has them both flinching. He snaps the phone open, presses it hard against his ear.

"Hey, sorry - Esposito gave us a phone, told us to use it instead. I think he and Beckett's dad have them too, now." Her words spill out in a torrent, but she pauses, and he can picture the slight furrow above her eyebrows as she collects herself. "Are you okay?"

He shakes his head, the relief at her voice swamping his mind, addling his brain. "I'm fine. Great. How was your trip?"

He can hear her sharp inhale, can hear her biting back all her questions that she must know he won't, can't answer. "It was good," she says. "We're at mom's right now. Everything's been fine. We've already had two shopping sprees. It's – it's weird, with the guards, but I'm getting used to it." She pauses, huffs a laugh. "Gina called. I think you might miss a deadline or two."

He hisses out a breath. He couldn't care less about deadlines, can't find the space in his heart to worry over Nikki when the live version of her is in so much danger, but he hasn't spent much time thinking about the real consequences. He's not so famous, not so recognizable that a clerk in a dingy motel will light up in recognition, but some people will notice his absence, after a while, some people willnotice if he suddenly drops off the face of the earth, and here he is, not thinking things through _again_, putting Beckett in danger _again _because of it. He's careless, too careless with her life, even when he doesn't mean to be, even when all he wants is to protect her.

His mother's voice sounds into the phone, the breeziness only slightly forced. "I told her you were hospitalized for exhaustion, dear, and that you needed an extended country vacation to recover. No writing."

He gapes. "You didn't."

"You work so hard, darling. It's not _that _much of a stretch."

"Mother. You basically told my ex-wife that I was _in rehab_."

He hears a chuckle from the corner of the room, looks up to see Beckett's eyes dancing in amusement. She's on her knees in front of his duffle, her plastic bags from Target spread across the floor, but she's momentarily arrested, her fingers clutching a shirt, her lips curved into a bemused smile. It's almost worth being in imaginary rehab.

Martha must take his silence as acceptance. "It's barely page six news, anyway. It's not like you did anything to go out in spectacular flames of glory."

"_It's in the papers already?" _ he hisses. He hears Beckett's give a very un-Beckett-like snort, but he doesn't look back over to her, wants to keep his sense of righteous indignation flaring for at least a moment.

"Well of course," Martha says, and then Alexis is talking into the phone again before he can get out another word.

"Really, it was my idea, Dad, I just – thought it was a good story." And that hurts, somehow, hurts more than it should, the idea of his daughter pretending that he's in _rehab_ so she can be safe, the ripples that it will have across her own life.

"Are you okay with that?" he murmurs.

He hears her laugh, a little brittle. "Yeah. All the in crowd has dads in rehab. Having the dependable, loving parent is so last year."

Her words knock into him, crash the breath out of his lungs, make him inhale a little too desperately for air.

"Kidding, I'm kidding," she's whispering, but of course she's not, not really. "I get it. I really – I get it."

"I –" he says, cuts himself off, not sure what he can possibly offer her.

"I know. You have to go," she supplies, sounding only slightly wounded.

"Alexis," he says, trying to let her hear it, how very sorry he is.

"Really," she murmurs, her voice more of an absolution now. "I didn't understand before, and I wish it wasn't like this, but I just –" she breaks off with a sigh, and he can see her almost as clearly as if she was standing right in front of him, shrugging slightly. "I love you."

The call clicks off before he can respond.

He wonders when he'll stop feeling like this, so aching, so empty, wonders if this is some insight into how Beckett feels all the time, the jagged edges of her mother's absence always brushing up against the softest parts of her.

He breathes through it – everyone he loves is okay, physically unharmed, at least, and that has to be enough to cling to for now. He bows his head, fiddles with his too-tight wedding ring, twisting it back and forth on his finger, relishing the slight pain as it pulls along his skin.

When he can finally look over at Beckett again, she's carefully smoothing a pair of jeans into his duffle bag. Earlier, when she was laughing at him, he hadn't registered, hadn't understood what she was doing. He realizes, now: she's moving her recently-acquired clothing into the empty parts of his duffle bag. She stills, looking up into his eyes, her fingers worrying the collar of a shirt she's just picked up. "I wanted –" she starts, swallows, continues. "I didn't think to buy a bag. But I can get one, soon." She shrugs, gesturing over to his phone. "I wanted to – give you time. Space." She smiles self-deprecatingly, maybe at the twisted logic of giving him space by moving her clothing into his bag.

He pushes himself off the bed, walks across the room, kneels down on the other side of the duffle bag from her, and reaches into a plastic bag and feels the light, slinky slide of fabric over his fingers. He emerges with his hand wrapped around a pair of dark blue underwear.

"There is absolutely _no way_ that that wasn't intentional," Beckett says, glaring at him as she folds a tank top into the side compartment. It's lucky his bag is stupidly huge; even so, it's going to be a tight fit.

She's not going to prod him, not going to ask him about his family, and he feels an overwhelming rush of affection and gratitude for her, for this woman who knows when to push and when to stop. His fingers clench around the scrap of fabric in his palm, and he feels the affection melt into something deeper and darker, flooding through his veins.

He realizes he's just sitting there, holding her underwear and staring at her instead of actually being useful, and even if she's feeling sorry for him there's only so long he can get away with this before she calls him out. He sighs, shifts, moves toward the duffle bag. This is a big deal, this is her tank tops against his jeans and her bras against his shirts, this is all she has right now, and she's throwing it into his bag. It's too much and not enough all at once.

She's folding a bra into a side compartment at the same time that he finally jerks himself into motion again, and suddenly her knuckles are brushing against his forearm. The warmth and shock of her skin startles through him, makes him gasp, makes his fist clench open and then closed. The underwear drops to the floor, but he can't bring himself to care, not when his heart is thudding arrhythmically against his sternum, not when Beckett has stilled, her eyes dark, her knuckles still against his arm.

"Castle," she whispers, and he can't tell whether it's a warning or an invitation but it doesn't matter because it's impossible for him to stop himself from leaning forward, over the duffle, grabbing the jut of her hipbones and pressing his mouth into hers, suddenly desperate, suddenly needing nothing but the lift and life of her body.

A rumble echoes in the back of her throat when he moves to her jaw, her neck, scraping his teeth over her pale skin, sweeping gentle kisses over the swathes of her darkened by bruises. His back and legs and neck are already spasming, echoing with a dull pain because this is no type of position into which anyone his age should be contorting, but he can't stop, can't break his mouth away from her, can't imagine how it's been nearly an entire twenty-four hours since he lost himself in the slick slide of her body.

She tangles a hand in the hair at the back of his head, tries to use another one to drag the duffle out of their way, growls in frustration when she can't. Her shoulders, he reminds himself, her shoulders and her ribs and her hip and her back, he needs to be careful, he needs to stop mauling her on the floor.

"Bed," he growls against her collarbone, his breath already coming hard and fast, his body already completely undone by her.


	8. Chapter 8

They have a rhythm now.

It's a tentative rhythm, borne of six days of long flat roads through fields and grassy plains. They still stumble through the edges of their nascent routine, tripping up against and into each other, but it's becoming more of a steady, reliable thing, a swing and step through the day into which they're slowly sliding.

He always wakes up to pale dawn light and to the hum and gurgle of the travel coffee maker they bought at Target on their second day. (They drink it black, now - didn't bother with creamer the first time, and he doesn't even want sugar anymore. He's growing accustomed to the acrid burn of it on his tongue.) Sometimes they make it through a sip, sometimes through half a mug before fingers start brushing over thighs and lips start crashing into lips and they fall back into bed, occasionally with a frenetic, crackling energy, occasionally with a quiet, lazy morning cadence that drifts them back into a doze against each other.

He's come to like the feel of cool black coffee sliding down his throat, has come to associate it with the taste of Beckett's skin and the smooth heat of her body.

They shower. Twice it's taken them an extra half hour; twice they haven't been able to resist crowding into one of the too-small stalls together as the hot water slowly started streaming cold over their tangled bodies.

They dress and pack. They rarely touch the duffle of cash. It sits in the corner of the room or under the bed. They haven't gotten around to getting Beckett her own bag yet – "It'll look weird, us checking in for one night with three separate pieces of luggage," she'd murmured as they'd stood before a suitcase display in a random WalMart, and he hasn't brought it up since, hasn't wanted anything other than the press and swirl together of everything they have.

He doesn't know when they'll have an efficient morning, doesn't know if he'll ever stopped being entranced by the slippery smooth heat of her enough to roll out of bed, drink his coffee, get dressed, leave the motel. He doesn't mind.

She always drives first.

Some mornings she's boneless beneath him by the time they've finished, her limbs loose and heavy and sated, but always by the time they're walking out the door she's humming with a nervous kind of energy, a low vibration that he can tell she needs to channel into _something_.

They eat granola bars or apples in the car as they drive. He doesn't like to stop more often than they have to. Not since the second day when there was a middle-aged woman in a tiny diner during breakfast that kept glancing at his face, assessing, like she might have recognized him. Definitely not since the third evening, when for fifteen miles there was, far behind them, the hazy outline of a dark sedan.

She never stops until lunch. They pull off at some roadside diner, or, on the days when she's still crackling with unreleased energy, a drive-through McDonalds. She always pulls her hair back before leaving the car (only sometimes, when she's driving, does she open the window and take out the elastic and let the strands whip free around her face). They both have baseball caps they wear in public. She's developed the habit of ducking her head, hiding her eyes beneath the brim of hers.

He drives after lunch, ever since a heated fight the second day when she, with pale cheeks and smudged circles under her eyes, still refused to relinquish the keys. He drives until they find a place to stop, a squat dingy strip of a motel where they can remain anonymous. They eat dinner at a diner or get takeout. Last night it was pizza that they fed to each other as they slouched on the bed. He wants takeout all the time.

The nights are his favorite. All of the different ways she can slowly, steadily unravel him, the press and roll of her body against him up on the wall or in the bed or under the shower spray or on the floor. The mornings are always shadowed by their impending departures, the looming stretch of a long day on the road, the worry of potential exposure, but the nights, the long and shadowed hours unfurling before them in which they are slowly learning to worry about only each other, the nights he's learned to love.

He calls Alexis every third day.

They call Esposito every other day. There are no leads.

They switch cars twice, dumping the old ones in the woods, buying new ones at cheap lots off the beaten path.

They drive without real aim, without goals. He tracks their progress on the map with a highlighter he bought from WalMart, tracing over their winding routes through the middle of the country. It's the hours, the distance, the space logged that counts. They don't discuss their lack of destination.

It's surprising only that he's the first one that creates a tiny jag in their rhythm, that he's driving down a long straight road at two in the afternoon, still full from lunch, and he glances over at her to see her curled against the window, legs up against her chest, absently, slowly drumming her fingers against her knee, and then he's veering off the pavement onto the dirt shoulder near a field of hay and stepping out of the car. He squints through the bright sun, lets the heat beat down against him, walks up to the grassy stalks that brush up to his chin.

He hears her door close softly.

This is not good. This is dangerous for her. He – he is still sometimes dangerous for her.

He feels her fingertips at her shoulders, cool compared to the midday heat, feels her breath brush lightly over his scapula. He shivers in the sun.

"Did I…" she whispers, trails off, circling her fingers lightly over the ridge of his shoulder.

He shakes his head, feels the grass scratching at his stubble. Here, there is only the vibrancy of her at his back, the warm pulse of the sun, the scrape of the hay against him. "Never been to Iowa," he says. They'll cross into Nebraska by nightfall. He hasn't been outside in this state except to traverse the distance between the diners and the car and the motels. Hasn't stopped to notice the different kind of beautiful, here, the way the sun starts to catch and shadow gold the stalks of grass, the crooked cracking red of a slanting barn in the distance, the sway and rhythm of the field in the barely-there breeze.

She shifts around him, her chest brushing against his bicep, until she's in the grass too, framed by it, staring into his eyes. She lifts her arms, curls her fingers around the back of his neck, leans in to brush her lips over his. Her hair catches the same golden light as the stalks of grass, and it's all at once too much. He looks up into the hard cobalt of the sky, closes his eyes, drops his forehead to rest against hers.

It's hard to vocalize the tyranny of the open road, the oppression of the vast swathes of space that they can never absorb, that they can do nothing but pass quickly through on their way from claustrophobic motel to claustrophobic motel.

He feels her index finger over his lips, quieting his thoughts, anchoring him in the steady physicality of her presence. He can't help but suck in a breath, part his mouth, draw her finger in with his teeth and lave his tongue over it. He lifts a hand to place it on the center of her chest, feels her sternum stutter up against his fingers, feels a wanting hum echo through down through her torso.

"Castle," she exhales, drawing her finger slowly away but leaving her hand just outside his mouth. He kisses his way along her knuckles, stopping at the battered bands of metal around her ring finger, exhaling lightly over them.

He will never be able to stop himself from wanting every part of her.

He skates his palms up under the hem of her shirt, feeling along the ridges of her spine as he crowds into her body, drops his mouth to her neck, grazes his teeth along a tendon in her neck. Her nails dig into his back, sharp bright pinpricks through his shirt.

"It's nice out," he says into her neck, spreading his fingers over her lower back, cradling her ever closer, bumping her hips into his. Her hands tighten, her nails nearly breaking his skin, as she settles her leg over one of his. "I just wanted to feel the sun."

"Next car we'll get the sunroof option," she says, canting her hips harder into his thigh.

He inhales sharply. "And leather seats. Satellite Radio."

"I'd settle for an air conditioner that worked more than intermittently," she gasps, dropping her forehead to his shoulder as she rocks again.

They need to stop now, need to stop before they can't anymore. "Beckett," he breathes, his voice pleading, warning.

"I know," she breathes, "Okay. I know." They're both exhaling in sharp, staccato bursts. She starts to settle down off of him, tries to step firmly back onto the grass, but her legs clench tighter around him and this low, needy moan echoes in her throat as she sinks her teeth into his collarbone, hard enough to hurt.

"Just –" he starts, grabbing her elbows and spinning them so that his back is to the grass and his eyes are on the road, and this is so wrong, this is so much needless danger, but he can feel her hot breath on his chest and he won't stop now, won't ever be able to deny her this.

He drops his thigh back and she growls jaggedly, but then he's sliding his fingers into her shorts and she's rocking and gasping against him, her breath coming in these sobbing gasps that cut through him, flay him, and it's not soon enough and all too soon before she's shaking against him, clenching silently as she pants jaggedly into the hollow of his throat.

One of his hands is still wrapped underneath her elbow, holding her up, waiting until she finally lifts her head and stares up at him with dark, dilated pupils.

She reaches for him, but he wraps his free hand lightly around her wrist, shaking his head. They've been far too careless already.

"You get to know Iowa a little better?" she husks as they start back towards the car.

"Yeah," he says. "Good state."


	9. Chapter 9

There's a Holiday Inn on the right side of the road that today, just today, tugs at him, has him easing off the gas as he imagines the clean rooms, the smooth sheets, the steady stream of hot water in the shower.

"I think we should stay there tonight." He tilts his chin at the hotel, suddenly apprehensive, suddenly yearning.

Beckett doesn't quite catch it, her eyes barely flicking over the building. "No, Castle," she says, voice just this side of bored.

"No, really," he tries.

"Too much money," she murmurs, offhand. She's slouched in the passenger seat, her fingers tracing nonsensical circles over the center console that, even as he battles his frustration with her, he can't help but find slightly arousing.

"We have _plenty _of money. Spending one night in a place that's a couple steps up from Fleabag Motel once'll be okay." She stills, turns to stare at him. "I mean, it's hardly the Ritz, Beckett. It's a _Holiday Inn_."

"Castle," she says, voice suddenly stronger, more present. At least she's paying attention now. "The people at the shitty motels don't remember faces. They make it a _point_ to forget faces. We start stepping up, even for a little, and we make it that much more likely that some overly-friendly concierge remembers us."

He shifts, tries not to let the sudden, irrational disappointment scrawl across his face. "It's our week-iversary," he says. He's going for breezy, lighthearted, but he can't help the weight at the edges of his words.

"That's not a thing, Castle," Beckett says, gently chiding.

"It is, and it's ours right now." He decides to push a little harder. He wouldn't, would never if he thought it would actually put her in danger, but – it's just a _Holiday Inn._ He's driving slowly down the road; he could hook a U-turn and have them back there in two minutes. "It could be fun to celebrate by splurging a little. Doing something different."

"Celebrate what," she breathes, so quietly he almost doesn't hear it. The words echo in his mind for a second, two, pinball there for the next half minute, and then he's slowly swerving onto the road's wide, paved shoulder, stopping the car softly, his foot easing down on the brake.

He lets himself feel the impact of her words only when he's carefully pulled the parking brake up. "What do you mean, _celebrate what_?" he hisses. There's an edge to his tone that shouldn't be there for what's more than likely just a simple misunderstanding. He's tired, and it's getting late, and he just – he wants more for her, more than the drab hotels and endless travel that wears at both of them, more than the fake, battered rings too loose around her fourth finger, more than all of it.

"Nothing," she murmurs, staring out the windshield, refusing to look at him, refusing to engage.

The words tumble out of him, visceral, raw. "Do you regret this, Beckett?" He gestures sharply between the two of them.

"Of course I do," she growls, low in the back of her throat, and oh, oh that hurts more than he ever thought it could. She finally turns to him, must see something in the stricken expression on his face that makes her continue. "Look at your life – your career, your home, your family, your _daughter_. Who _knows_ when you'll get to see her, when you'll get to see any of that again? All that time I waited so I wouldn't hurt you." He can see her nails flex sharply into her thigh. "If only I hadn't gone to your place that night…" She trails off.

"If you hadn't gone to my place, I might not have seen the text until the morning. You might have been home when whoever ransacked your apartment got there."

She shrugs, wordless.

"What do you think they would have _done _to you?" he growls.

She reaches down, lifts a plastic bottle from the floor of the car. Her throat works as she takes a swig of water. "I know what they would have tried to do to me, Castle."

Her words clench in his chest, contract his muscles, and he needs to let it out, somehow, the horrible energy that's suddenly coiled in his body from the images her words have created. He slams the heel of his hand into the top of the steering wheel, relishes the solid thump, the pain that flares up his arm in fiery spindles, the jerk and flinch of her body in the passenger seat.

He closes his eyes. Focuses on the burn in his hand. On the warmth of the sun, slanting through the windshield onto his face. On the nearly-inaudible sound of her almost-steady inhales and exhales. When he finally feels more in control, when he can finally look, she's turned in the seat, legs curled up underneath her, watching him with a dark seriousness in her eyes. "I wake up with you in the mornings and I'm so happy –" she swallows, flicks her gaze out the windshield before looking back at him – "I'm so happy to see you. But I can't – you have to know – this is so much less than you deserve."

"What about you?" he whispers, but she just silently shakes her head. He's deflated, out of words. She's going to break him, going to kill him with how cavalierly she treats her life, with how steadfastly she puts his safety above their togetherness.

He swallows. Puts the car in gear. Pulls out onto the road, eyes already scanning for yet another cheap motel.

* * *

The bed is cold. He blinks his eyes open, rubs at them blearily. There's rain pounding on the sheet-metal roof of the motel. The sound echoes around the dark room.

She's sitting on the battered sofa underneath the window, her knees drawn up, one arm drawn around her shins. Her right hand – her right hand is wrapped around her gun. She's utterly motionless except for that one hand, tapping out a staccato rhythm on her kneecap with the handle of the Glock.

He pushes himself abruptly into a sitting position. "Beckett," he says, his voice coming out far more sharply than he'd intended, but he can't – he wishes she wasn't holding her gun like that. Like's she's itching to use it on something.

Her hand stills. "Sorry, Castle," she says, voice low. "Didn't mean to wake you. Go back to sleep."

Like hell. He gets out of the bed, shivers a little, sinks down onto the couch at her feet.

"It was the rain, I think," he mumbles, shifting to find a more comfortable position. "I can actually feel this couch giving me a disease."

She tries a laugh for him, but it's worn, threadbare.

He fixes his eyes on her right hand, waiting. The sharp sound of rain on metal reverberates through the room.

"I don't know how much longer I can do this," she murmurs, fingers still wrapped loosely around her gun as she stares out the window. Nothing but inky blackness and rivulets of rain streaming down the pane of glass.

His exhale snags in his lungs. "Do what?" he finally manages. He can't tell if this is something different, if she's thinking back to their argument in the car. They haven't really spoken to each other since, haven't done more than hummed and murmured half-broken sentences.

"I don't know. Run."

He waits on her, hopes she'll continue. The rain and the darkness and the coiled tension from the car are causing a different kind of energy to pour out of her, sharp and brutally honest.

"I can feel it, sometimes," she says, "every muscle and every bone in my body crying out to go back to Manhattan. To just – to make a stand. Wherever that leaves me."

The last time they discussed this, she kept running headlong into the battle and got herself damn near thrown off a roof. "You know what that stand would be," he chokes out.

"I do."

"_Kate_," he moans, feeling her words viscerally hit his stomach, a wave of nausea coursing through him. This is the second time today she's talked about staring down her death like this, with something too close to a calm acceptance.

"I don't want that," she murmurs. He stares at her, tries to keep the desolation from spreading into every facet of his being. "I don't. I just – I don't know how much longer I can keep running away. There's so much to investigate. There's so much to learn."

She wasn't built for running. Her fight-or-flight is just fight, just the omnipresent, reflexive desire to turn and make a stand. That instinct, that instinct paired with this disaster of her mother's case, is going to get her killed. "I wouldn't leave you," he says. "Your stand would be my stand."

She shakes her head. Puts the gun down carefully beside her, reaches her hand out to trail her finger gently over the top of his knee, then lets it rest there, lightly. "I won't let you die for me," she says, like that should be a comfort, like that should ease the horrible ache in his chest.

"You know it's not that," he murmurs, voice rasping across all the jagged, whirling possibilities, all the _what ifs _and _almosts _that her words are dredging up in him.

She twists her mouth into a wry smile at that. "I know."

"Just –" he reaches over, wraps his hands around her fingers that still rest against his knee, tries to leach some warmth and comfort into her cold skin. "I'm sorry," he finally says, can't get any further than that. Sorry the elusive words to make it right tangle in his throat. Sorry they're suddenly so at odds. Sorry for the constant tripping through routine, the exhausting, monotonous scratchy sheets and hours in the shaking Sentra and the way she has to suffocate every one of her instincts and flee because of a case that _he _opened up in the first place.

"We'll figure it out," she says, her voice suddenly laced with steel.

He hears it in her, the words she doesn't say. It's been a week. She's going to need something more than a half-formed plan to flee a step ahead of her would-be assassins. Hell, soon he's going to need more, too. "Yeah," he agrees, tugging her hand up to his mouth, dragging his lips along the back of her knuckles. She exhales, a long, shuddering sigh. "Not right now, though," he says, kissing the nail of her index finger, pulling the tip of it into his mouth, circling his tongue around it.

"Tomorrow," she husks, already canting toward him, the coiled energy in her body shifting, melting from a tense, caged panic to a deeper, needy hum.

He worries about both of them, worries that they won't be able to distract themselves with physicality forever, worries that they won't be able to sustain their constant flight, worries that, sooner or later, they'll both need to turn and fight, even if it's impossible, even if they'll almost certainly be destroyed.

She folds in over her legs, slides her body against his, skids her lips down the column of his throat. "Stop worrying," she growls into his neck, swinging a leg over his lap so that she's straddling him, her hands already slipping down his abdomen.

"Distract me," he gasps up against her when her fingers trail underneath the waistband of his boxers.

She hums an affirmation into his mouth as he runs his hands through her hair.

There are worse ways to keep from worrying.


	10. Chapter 10

He wakes her up when threads of dawn light are just starting to spin through the window.

They don't manage to make it out of bed until nine thirty.

He can tell she's trying to relax - her slow and steady motions as she brewed the coffee, the way she didn't even twitch when he carried their bags out to the car and she sat back the bed and drank the dregs, the suppleness of her body as she let him press her down yet again against the scratchy sheets.

She drifts nearer to him as they walk toward the car, and with each easy bump of her elbow into his forearm he feels another small piece of himself ease, uncoil in the morning light. They'll figure it out. They'll be okay. She'll be okay.

That's why he almost ignores it when they reach the hood and a flash in the distance catches the corner of his gaze. _It's nothing_, he tells himself, but no, there it is again, it's not –

"Down," he's shouting as he flings his body into hers, pressing her into the ground, and as they fall he senses the split-second angry rigidity of her muscles, the instant where she's poised to ask him what the _hell_ he's doing, and he feels for a heartbeat a wash of embarrassment and relief. But then there's a soft pop and his arm is stinging and Beckett, just as she hits the ground, is already shouting at him.

"Get up, get off, let's _go_."

He props up on his elbows and wriggles toward the driver's seat; she moves toward the passenger's, and shit, _shit_, they are going to get shot to death in the parking lot of a dirty motel and they're not even going to be next to each other; he won't even have the brush of her hand against his as his final moment of consciousness.

There's another muffled pop and a crack, a shatter, some glass from the car, he thinks. He curses quietly, but it could be worse, the sniper must have a bad angle, must have something preventing him from getting a perfect shot. He gets to the handle, reaches up, opens the door. The driver's side window is immediately shot out, raining down small pieces of glass on him.

"Castle?" he hears the hushed whisper from the other side of the car.

"I'm okay." He clutches his keys tightly. "Count of three, get in the car and I'm driving."

"You have to stay low, Castle. You hear me?"

"One," he says.

A sharp crack – Beckett firing off a round in response, a hopeless, angry, desperate round that has no chance of reaching its target.

"Two."

Another sharp sound, and then the harsh clatter of more glass hitting the pavement.

"Three," he says, launching his body up into the driver's seat, flattening himself as low as possible, hunching against the steering wheel as he slams his door shut.

He glances over as he jams the keys into the ignition, and there she is, pressed flat against the passenger seat, back heaving in gasping breaths, and okay, okay, he can do this, he can do anything with her alive and whole beside him.

He throws the car into reverse. The tires screech as he whips around and the hood catches and careens off something, another car or a tree or a rock, he can't tell, can't see well enough, but right when he goes to lift his head up a bit more a bullet shatters through the side view and he decides the increased visibility isn't worth it.

"Okay?" Beckett asks, voice high and strained. It must be killing her, killing her to be flattened in the passenger seat right now, to be hunched over and waiting and hoping that he'll save them.

"Good," he grits out, swerving out of the parking lot, skidding onto the two lane country road and slamming harder on the accelerator, straightening up enough to peer over the wheel, because it would be absolutely ridiculous for them to die in a head-on collision one minute after escaping what he is absolutely going to call a hail of bullets in the retelling.

"Castle," he hears her whisper, voice sharp with horror, and his whole body jerks, turns toward her. The car fishtails violently and he has to suck in a breath, ease off the accelerator and swing violently back into their lane, force himself to suck in air and straighten out the wheel because suddenly all he can picture is her sitting in the seat next to him, quietly bleeding out from a carefully-aimed bullet.

He gets the car cruising steadily in the lane, twenty miles an hour above the speed limit. The road is straight enough. He glances to her, prepared to swing onto the wide shoulder, prepared to surrender any cover and bring her to whatever hospital she needs, to go in carrying both their guns, to immediately find the biggest team of private security he can buy.

But she's sitting ramrod straight, no wound that he can see. Her face is deathly pale, her eyes fixed on his torso.

He glances down.

His arm is covered – _covered _– in blood.

It doesn't hurt. "Wow," he says. "I am _so badass._"

At the sound of his voice, she finally unsticks. She has a short sleeve sweater on over a tank top, today, a pairing that makes her chest look _wonderful_, which he can't help but notice anew as she drags the sweater off her body and pushes up the sleeve of his t-shirt to see the middle of his bicep.

"Do you think I'll have an awesome scar? Is it a through and through? Beckett, I've always wanted to say I've had a through and through."

He can't feel any pain in his arm, but he can feel his heart thumping erratically at his ribcage, the wash of adrenaline pulsing hard through his veins. He keeps his eyes on the road, but when he blinks he can still see the shadow of the stream of blood down his arm.

Her fingers brush along his flesh. "_Ouch_," he hisses. He finally feels the sting, an ember of awareness that's quickly kindling into a fire. He can tell her hands are trembling faintly, a low vibration that just translates to his arm.

"It's grazed," she finally says. "But, Castle, it's just deep enough – I don't know, it would be good to get it checked." Without warning, she pushes her sweater up against his arm, wraps it tightly, tugging it down onto the wound.

"Damnit, _ouch_," he snaps.

"Sorry, sorry," she whispers, her voice low, full of grief. "I'm so sorry."

"No, it's fine," he murmurs, not so overwhelmed by the hot trickle of blood down his arm that he can ignore the hurt in her tone.

"Pull over," she says. "We can switch."

He's been watching the rearview, there's nothing he can see behind them, but like _hell_ he's doing that. "I'm good," he says.

"You were _shot_," she grits out.

"Grazed," he clarifies. "Although – do you think I'll still be able to say I was shot at poker games?"

"Damnit, Castle," she growls, pressing the sweater down even harder onto his arm.

"Hey," he says, jerking away. She moves with him, fluid, keeping the sweater pressed against his arm.

He grimaces. "You are _never_ this sadistic when I fantasize about you playing nurse with me."

"Castle," she hisses. He chances another glance over at her, the clenched angle of her jaw, the bloodless pallor to her face. She seems like she's halfway to a PTSD episode and he's overcompensating and it's an absolutely terrible combination.

"Okay, okay," he murmurs, concentrating for a moment on the slight shake of the steering wheel underneath his fingertips, on the rapid shallowness of Beckett's breathing, on the sharp sting lancing through his arm.

"What are we going to do?" she murmurs, her voice tremulous, hoarse, he imagines, from keeping tears and panic at bay.

"Keep driving," he answers.

She pins him with a glare that's far shakier than he wishes it were.

"I'm not being flippant. I just… what else?"

"You could have_ died_," she breathes, her breathing shallow and harsh.

He squeezes the steering wheel, flexes his bicep up against her, lets the pain threading through his arm focus him, channel his scattered thoughts.

The last time one of them was this close to a bullet it wasn't a graze. The last time one of them was this close to a bullet it almost broke her, almost broke him, almost broke them both and she's right, she's right to be pale and shocky and trembling against him. There is still someone gunning for them and they've been _found_ and it is suddenly all too likely that they are going to die an abrupt and bloody death.

"You're right," he says, his voice low, rough, too close to tears. "You're right." He presses a little harder on the accelerator, eases the car up to 80. The steering wheel vibrates, makes the bullet wound thrum and throb, but he can't, won't ease up now.

They're both silent for a long time. He wants to say something, comfort her, ease the pallid panic in her eyes, but the words are snarled and he has only one pulsing, relentless thought – she's right, she's right, she's right.

She reaches over awkwardly with her free hand, the one that's not pressing the sweater against his arm, and thumbs on the radio. A voice crackles to life through the silence, and of _course _it's some country singer whining the lyrics about losing his life, losing his everything. She stabs at the power button violently, and they're enveloped again in quiet, the only sounds her too-fast breathing, the harsh rush of wind against the car, the squeak of the chassis as he tries to ease a few miles an hour faster.

He doesn't know how long it takes before her fingers to steady against him, before she draws that first deep breath. "If you need a hospital," she starts, but he's already shaking his head sharply.

He doesn't know. He's never been shot before. It burns, fire coursing through the blood of his arm. If they go to a hospital, she will be in even more danger. "No. I don't. It's fine."

She drags in another deep breath of air. "We'll travel further," she murmurs. "Switch the car again."

He steels himself against it, but the thought still rolls over him in a wave that leaves him breathless. "No more burner phone," he says. No more talking to Ryan or Esposito or anyone at the 12th. If the Dragon is found, they won't know at first, but at least they'll be alive to not know. No more talking to Alexis. If he can't speak to his daughter, he can at least pretend she's safe.

She hums, disagreeing, in the back of her throat. "We'll just keep the SIM card out for now. For a while."

It's useless. They're being hunted by people far more prepared, far more trained than they are. He knows it. She knows it. They're on a clock, have always been on a clock, and their time is slipping relentlessly away from them.

"Beckett," he murmurs, his voice thin, cracking.

"Just drive," she whispers, pressing the sweater tightly against his arm. "We'll be fine. Just drive."


	11. Chapter 11

He wakes to the sound of crickets and, save that, a sudden silence.

His head hurts. His arm hurts.

"Time?" he murmurs, blinking muzzily. It's pitch black out.

"Just after 2. I'm getting us a room. Sleep."

"S'it safe?" he asks, running a hand through his hair, trying to will himself into wakefulness. His whole body is thumping, an uncomfortable beat pounding through his veins. The blood at his temples pulses. His arm throbs.

"It's still fine," she says, and then he hears the soft fall of her footsteps moving away from him.

They haven't noticed anyone following them yet, though they've stopped four times – three for gas, one to ditch the car and buy a battered Hyundai. She'd hastily wrapped his arm with gauze after guiding their bullet-riddled car into a copse of trees in a now-well-practiced maneuver. They'd both been sharply, painfully alert all day, hyperaware of every noise and every flicker of light, but as the night descended, he'd slowly slid into sleep, soothed toward unconsciousness by the quiet hum of the car and the low murmur of her voice, urging him to rest.

He drowses, now, drifting in an uneasy, half-awake state. The click and rush of the passenger door opening drags him up to consciousness, and feels her fingers, warm and steady, carding through his hair.

"C'mon," she murmurs, reaching down to wrap her hand around his, to tug him up. "Don't want to stay out here too long."

The air bites at him, sharp and clear and cold, the snap of a Midwest early morning. He shudders, his fingers rattling against hers.

She maneuvers both bags onto one of her arms, keeps his hand enfolded in hers as she leads him to the room, flicks on the lights, drops the duffles in the corner, sits him on the bed.

He wiggles his eyebrows, though he can tell by the look in her eyes how faded his effort is. "You know how I love it when you take charge."

"Good," she says, her voice rough with exhaustion. She's been driving for – he doesn't know how long, but over twelve hours, at any rate, ever since he finally felt safe enough to pull into a gas station and she insisted on taking the wheel. "Take your shirt off," she tosses over her shoulder, stepping away from him to rummage through their bag. He watches the lithe lines of her torso, the slight bow of her shoulders that betrays her fatigue, her worry.

When she turns with the first aid kit, he vaguely registers her glare. "What?" he asks.

"First time I've told you to take your shirt off that you haven't listened."

"Oh," he says, staring down at himself, feeling an odd kind of exhausted, his mind trapped in syrup, adrift in a thickly sweet sea.

He shifts, grabs the hem of his shirt, but then she's in front of him, tilting his chin up, staring into his eyes, her lips pressed tightly together in concern, her fingers tripping gently along his forehead.

He blinks, hard, tries to shake some wakefulness into his body.

"Just tired," he says, answering her unspoken question.

"You sure?" she gruffs, and God, he would do anything to get her to stop looking at him like he's spreading cracks along her heart.

Her fingers are at his jaw, now, tracing invisible patterns over the stubble at the bone. He lets his eyes slowly drift shut, sighing into the sudden heat and heft of her hands as she cradles his head with a steady warmth, anchoring him.

"Castle," she whispers, and then he feels her lips, dry and soft, brushing along his forehead, the tip of his nose, the corner of his mouth. He blinks his eyes open and she's leaning over him in a way that has to be killing her after so long spent driving. He reaches a too-heavy hand out to her, rests it at her lower back, feels even though his light touch the hard knots of her muscles. He pushes at her with a knuckle, feels her broken exhale against his cheek before she straightens.

"Your back," he murmurs. She's still covered in mottled bruises from her battle with the sniper. Sometimes he still catches her wincing after too long in the car. Today was not what she needed, a tense fifteen-hour drive following a hard dive to the pavement. He watches her intently, the slight lines around her mouth, the rigidity of her shoulders, the careful way she draws in air.

"No," she growls out, sudden, vehement. "You don't get to look at me like that right now." He starts to question, protest, but she plows ahead. "Not when I just got you shot."

"Kate. You can't - " He can't even begin, she is so _wrong _and his thoughts are so snarled that he can't untangle them for her. "Please," he says, hoping she hears, hoping she understands. The weight of her guilt on him is too heavy, too much right now.

She nods, once, reaches down to the hem of his shirt and tugs up. He lifts his arms obediently, winces at the burn in his bicep as she carefully drags the fabric up and over his head.

She unwraps the gauze carefully. When she bandaged it before, his pulse was still too fast in his throat and her hands still jerked unsteadily at his arm; they were both still shrouded in a cloud of panic. Now, she's steadier, methodical as she stands before him, and he can't help the memory that flashes through his brain of her smiling softly at him in the back of an ambulance as she unwound a bandage from around his knuckles.

How different it could all be right now, if he'd only known enough to stop her then. If he'd only been able to convince her not to push, months before a bullet ever cracked through her chest. If he'd never opened the case in the first place, never dragged her down this misguided quest for justice that every day has less of a chance of anything but a tragic ending for them both.

The tension of the bandage falls away from his arm as she shifts, folding to sit next to him on the bed. He peers down, intending to look at the bullet wound, but his gaze catches her first. Her nose is several inches from the wound, her eyes dark and serious, her lips slightly parted. His heart stumbles erratically against his sternum, overwhelmed by her singularly focused presence at his side.

He yelps suddenly; she's dragging a sterile wipe along his the wound. It sizzles with pain, distracts him from her for an instant. "A little warning, Beckett?"

She ignores him, continues to carefully clean the area. "It's not so bad," she finally breathes as she draws away, the heaviness of relief weighting her words.

"See?" he asks, purposefully watching her eyes instead of his arm as she swabs on antiseptic and then starts to wind a roll of gauze around his bicep. "Knew I'd be fine."

"But I'm not – if this gets infected – and it bled so much." She cuts off her jerky train of thought, shaking her head as she wraps the wound with hands that aren't quite as certain as they were a moment ago.

He reaches over, wraps his fingers around her shoulder and squeezes briefly. He feels more awake, the pulsing energy in his arm clarifying his thoughts, the heat of her body at his side concentrating his attention. "We made it," he tells her.

Somehow they've both missed it, this time, the giddy exhilaration of survival, the frenzied relief of escaping death, the heady rush of a life that's somehow still ahead of them. "Too close," she chokes out, finally taping the gauze down. "It was so close."

He ignores the sting in his arm as he reaches over, tilts her chin up so he can catch her eyes. She looks so desolate, so hurt, that he can't help but lean to the side, turning and sliding his lips over hers, trying to swallow her worry and grief and guilt with the desperate strength of his love for her. With his other hand he reaches down, skates it up under her shirt, over the soft skin of her lower abdomen. He feels her shudder underneath his fingertips, her body suddenly taut with need. She reaches up and over, rests her hands on his shoulders, pushes him gently back onto the bed. She follows with her own body, her angles and contours hovering a breath above him.

"Let me take care of you," she whispers against his jugular, her lips skating over his Adam's apple, down the plane of his chest. Her hands rove over his sides, hips, abdomen, setting a fire in him that has nothing to do with the burning in his arm.

He moves again to touch her, his fingers stumbling onto her jaw, sliding down her neck, needing more of her, needing everything, but she reaches up a hand, wraps her hand around his and presses his arm back against his chest. "Let me take care of you," she says into the bottom edge of his sternum, her voice on the edge of breaking.

Her fingers reach the button of his jeans. "Kate," he growls, the wash of desire and heartbreak overcoming him, taking away his words and his breath, taking away everything but the heat of her.

* * *

He wakes to the sensation of falling, of reaching out to catch himself on something that's not there.

He blinks, tries to adjust to the darkness, rubs his eyes to clear the lingering vertigo.

The room is cold.

The bed is empty.

He stumbles up, feeling the sudden throb in his arm. It's more muted, now, not as sharp as before. Through the window, he can see that the sky is just edging toward dawn. A new day. They should get going.

Where is she?

He walks over to the door, flips on the light switch.

Something is wrong.

The room is still. The table in the corner – something is wrong.

His pulse thrums so hard through his veins that he can feel his body jerk with it, with the horrible crushing panic that sings through his muscles.

He can hear her voice echoing in his head as he surveys the battered table in the corner, the items carefully arranged on top of it.

Her rings lie there: _It's over._

The burner phone sits next to them: _You can't call me._

Both Glocks are gone: _You don't need a gun._

A crumpled receipt underneath the car keys. He turns it, sees the bold, unwavering strokes of her handwriting on the back: _Go home. I love you._


	12. Chapter 12

He doesn't know how much time she has on him. Where she would go. What she would do.

He throws everything into the duffle bag except her rings, which he slides into his pocket. He stupidly, sentimentally leaves his on his finger. He stumbles out of the motel, through the parking lot, moving blindly, automatically. When he gets to the car, he stops and stands there, stands there with his hands twitching and his arm burning and his legs shaking and his pulse still thumping hard enough to make his eyes water.

Would she – she wouldn't be dumb enough to hitchhike. Just the thought of it, of her standing by the road, her arm bent and her thumb out, waiting for a random truck, maybe driven by her sniper, maybe driven by a sociopath looking for a gorgeous woman by the side of the road. She wouldn't. But she didn't take the car.

Why wouldn't she at least have taken the damn car?

He takes the map out, spreads it across the hood, has to squint to see it in the gathering dawn light. He shouldn't be standing in the open like this.

He doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything but finding her.

The map is shaking. His hands can't hold it steady.

She must have left their bed in the middle of the night. Must have carefully disentangled her arms from his, stepped softly onto the thin and dirty carpet, dragged her clothes from the duffle bag and pulled them onto her body, taking care to move so quietly. Did she even sleep? She was so tired last night. Did she even get any rest at all before she walked out that door?

He groans, digs his palms into his eyelids until he sees lights dancing at the edges of the darkness, until he presses the questions out of his mind for a brief and blissful heartbeat. _Cute trick_, he can hear her saying, and before he knows it a moan is escaping him, low and visceral and scraping over the harsh burn in the back of his throat.

Okay. Okay.

He can do this.

She didn't want to hurt him. She did something horrible and harsh and so, _so _stupid, but she did it because she thought she was going to get him killed. Because he refused to go to the hospital last night. Because he tried to shield her from their bullets yesterday. And he would do it again, he would do it again without even a second thought. They both know it. They both know it, and this - this is her trying to shield him.

This is her throwing her body in front of his, the only way she knows how.

By leaving him behind.

It winds him, burns down his face as he stares at the vast and shaking map, at all the hopeless spaces she could be.

It's useless.

He folds the map. Gets in the car. Swipes at his cheeks.

Maybe she barely has a lead on him. Maybe she was so panicked that she decided to hitchhike. Maybe he can find her a mile down the road, standing, whole, waiting for a ride. The thought of it catches in his chest, flutters a desperate hope against his sternum. He hits the end of the parking lot, turns left – he'll drive five miles, maybe find her; if not, he'll turn around, drive the other way, and try again.

* * *

He finds it two hours later. Six miles from where he'd begun, down the first road he'd driven. The sun is up now, relentless already. He's been driving in circles, purposeful, at first, then aimless, hopeless, desperate patterns along the small chain of roads near the motel. His arm throbbing, heart racing, panic clawing at his chest.

When he sees the used car lot, he knows.

The man who steps out of the tiny tin-roofed building to greet him is older. His eyes are not unkind.

Castle resists the urge to run at him. Makes himself pause for one heartbeat, two, three. Inhale, exhale. Running around in a desperate panic won't help him, won't get him the answers he so urgently needs.

"Help ya?" the man asks.

"Steve," Castle says, grabbing the man's hand firmly.

"Tom," the man says, eyes raking quickly over Castle. He tries to look steady, dependable. Tries to still the desperate, vibrating panic that still rattles his bones.

"I'm actually looking for someone," Castle tries, hoping that he's read the man correctly, that honesty is his best approach. "A woman. Five nine, long brown hair, early thirties."

"Came to the wrong place," Tom says, turning and walking back toward the building before Castle can even begin to continue.

"Please," he chokes out, desperate, his voice cracking. He's close. He knows he's close. "I need your help."

Tom turns around, eyes Castle with a dark, angry suspicion. "Supposing I do see someone here. Nice-looking lady. Holding it together, but clearly unsettled. Trying to hide some bruises at her neck with a summer scarf. You think I'm gonna talk about her to the first guy to come asking after her?"

Tom's not walking away anymore, but he's squaring his feet, setting his jaw like he's getting ready for a fight. Castle doesn't need a fight. He just needs answers.

"Goodbye," Tom says, dismissive, the sharp edge of a threat in his voice.

Castle turns his palms up in supplication. This is not good. It's all too easy to see the situation through the car dealer's eyes: a desperate, battered woman on the run, a too-urgent man searching for her. "It's not like that."

"Right." Tom's voice is hard, harsh, unrelentingly unsympathetic.

"She _is_ in trouble. But – please – I need to find her."

Tom just stares. One of his fists is tightly balled. "A girl like that – what're you _thinking_?"

"I swear, I would never hurt her," Castle says, feeling his pulse thudding frantically through his veins. "I'm just trying to protect her. "

"How about you protect yourself by getting the hell out of here," Tom growls, not a question at all, and then he's spinning on his heel, walking away.

Four years of sitting with Beckett in interrogations, _four years _of carefully pulling information out of unwilling people, and now, now when it matters so much, he's failing.

He lunges forward, wraps his fingers around Tom's wrist to draw him back. The man spins around, jaw clenched, arm tensed, ready to swing.

"There are men hunting her," Castle says, voice quiet, low, deathly honest. "One found her, a week ago. That's how she got those bruises. They found us again yesterday." He pulls the sleeve of his shirt up, enough to show the gauze wrapped around his arm, slightly stained with blood. It's not enough proof. He has no evidence that she didn't inflict this injury herself in a frenetic attempt to escape him. It's not enough. It's all he has. "We were lucky."

Tom watches him warily, but his fists slowly start to relax. "Why'd she come here on her own, then?"

Castle swallows. "She wanted to protect me. They're not a danger to me." The words scrape over his throat. "They – they just want her."

He can see the second the older man capitulates, the sigh that ripples through his body, the slight tilt forward of his torso. "Came here an hour ago, just as I was opening up. Said she wanted the cheapest thing that would run."

"What was it?"

"Black '83 Yamaha Virago bike."

Castle can't hide his flinch. "A _motorcycle_?"

"Cheapest thing we had that would start reliably," Tom says on a shrug. "Didn't know people were after her at the time."

"Did she –" he has to pause, clear his throat, take the rough edge of accusation off the words. "Did she have a helmet?"

"I had one in the back. Gave it to her with the bike. Didn't seem like she had one on her."

Castle closes his eyes, drags in a deep breath. "Do you know which way she turned?"

Tom shakes his head. "Sorry," he says, and he genuinely seems like he might be. "Luck to you." He turns and walks away. Castle doesn't try to stop him this time.

He lifts a hand, pinches the bridge of his nose. At least he has information now, at least he knows what to start looking for – but it's a motorcycle_, _a damn _motorcycle_, and the thought of her flying down the road, so exposed, so easy to target, has his breath stuttering from an oppressive kind of terror.

In the car, he pulls the map back out. It doesn't fit right when he's in the driver's seat; the paper crumples up against the steering wheel, folding in on itself. It's too big. Too much space, too many places to look, and she's out there, out there with not even the glass and metal cage of a car to protect her.

He'll never find her.

He closes his eyes, bows forward until his head hits the map. He aches from exhaustion, from the wound in his arm, from the jagged pain of her sudden absence.

There are so many roads, so many possibilities that lead her away from him. He doesn't know. He can't begin to predict her. If he could, then he'd have known she'd slink out of their bed in the middle of the night; he'd have known she'd leave him behind.

Except –

_I don't know how much longer I can keep running away_, she'd told him in the darkness of their room, one hand clenched around her gun. Without him – he lifts his head, eyes roving over the spindling roads of the map – without him, the country would no longer be full of endless possibilities. Without him, the vast network of potentials would contract, funnel to a single point. Without him, all roads would lead to Manhattan. To a place where she could make her stand.

Where she could die fighting instead of fleeing.

* * *

He stops at a diner an hour after he can't get the road to sharpen into focus, an hour after the lines of asphalt start swaying and doubling no matter how many times he blinks or reaches up a heavy hand to press against his eyes.

He wouldn't have stopped even then, but he knows that he'll miss her, miss some vital clue that will lead him to her, if he can't even get himself to see straight.

"Coffee," he rasps when he feels a presence at his side. He doesn't turn his eyes away from the map, a talisman, a constant invocation of her presence. He has two hundred miles left. There are three hundred miles of a most likely road, a straight shot towards Manhattan, before paths diverge, twist south and wind north in a separation that could draw him inexorably away from her.

There's still a shadow over the map. He manages to tear his eyes away. The waitress, an older woman with a worried twist to her lips, hovers. "How about some food?" she asks, a little too kindly.

Castle presses his lips together, swallows, can't find it in himself to feel anything but an empty, aching nausea. Yesterday, they ate granola bars and split a bag of chips from a gas station; they were both too keyed up, too ready to move, to eat any more.

He needs to eat. Needs to fix himself, to eat and drink and focus, so he can find her. "Midwest slammer," he says, the first thing on the menu that his eyes land on.

She won't have eaten.

He knows this with a sudden clarity, knows this as surely as he knows anything. Sneaking out of the room in the middle of the night, exhausted, not giving him a chance to convince her otherwise. Leaving the car. Buying a broken-down motorcycle. The sum of it is more than just a desperate flight.

She's punishing herself.

He closes his eyes, rests his elbows on the table and his head against his palms, pushes at the edges of his equation. The memory of the bullet hitting her chest, the leak of life out of her heart, into his hands. The sudden weight of his body driving her into the pavement, the soft crack of the sniper's rifle as he shot at them, the slick of his blood under her fingertips. The oppressive guilt, the consuming worry that next time, it won't be a graze on his arm. That next time, it will be him.

She won't get a room at a motel. She won't stop to eat at a diner. She'll push herself back to Manhattan as fast as she is able. Snack at gas stations. Rest by the side of the road when she must. Put as much distance between them as she possibly can.

She won't care as much about them finding her. Not with the memory of his blood constantly flowing through the back of her mind.

He flinches back from the thought, but it's there, lurking at the back of every calculation. She just needs it to be over. It doesn't matter how.

The clink of a plate against the Formica startles him out of his own thoughts. He opens his eyes, takes in the plate of eggs and cup of coffee, swallows against the nausea in his stomach that roils every time he pictures Beckett right now, riding a battered motorcycle down the road alone, Beckett, bleeding to death in a quiet field.

The waitress is hovering again, watching him with eyes that are narrowed in concern. "Can I get you something else?" she murmurs. The compassion in her face grates against him.

"No, thanks," he grits out, his teeth clenched. She walks away.

He drinks his coffee. Eats his food. Forces every last bite and every last sip down his throat, until his vision doesn't sway anymore when he moves his head, until the grey fog is almost gone from the edges of his vision.

His arm throbs and his head pounds when he stands, but every moment that he's slouched at the diner booth is another moment she draws further and further away.

He walks outside into the heat of the midday sun, gets into the car, and drives.


	13. Chapter 13

The sunlight blinds him.

Somewhere there are sunglasses, maybe in a bag in the back. He won't stop to find them.

He scans the road obsessively, compulsively, squinting as though the sheer strength of his hope can force the slim outline of a motorcycle into existence on the road ahead.

He pushes the car past eighty, edges toward ninety. The vibrations shake his bones, rattle his teeth, knock through his body. The car skitters in the lane, shimmying from side to side as the old, battered frame protests, tries to pull apart.

The fields to the side of him are a blessing. The grass is shorter, too short to hide in. The light is clear. The road is open.

If she's pulled off somewhere, he'll find her. Unless they've found her first.

* * *

The warmth and light of day dwindles into a heavy twilight.

If he keeps driving, he could bypass her: she could pull off to the side of the road and he could fly right by without ever knowing. If he stops and waits for light, he might never catch her.

He hasn't felt this choked with terror since she was shot. He's not sure when, exactly, he got to the point where he felt like he could face anything with her, but her sudden absence highlights it, presses the cold knowledge of his need for her deep into his bones.

The eastern sky is inky and the light is slowly edging out of the west when he hits the edge of the fields. To his right, trees tower into the sky.

His hands move before his brain catches up with them, jerking the wheel of the car, swerving to the side of the road as he slams on the brake. He throws himself out of the driver's seat, his heart suddenly pounding, his feet tripping over grass, then leaves.

She's always stopped at forests. They're where she ditched their first and second and third cars. Where she changed by the side of the road on that first day. Where her muscles loosen, where she draws deeper breaths, where her eyes get an extra spark of life back in them.

If she rode all day, if she rode until her vision was tunneling grey and the road was undulating, if she had just enough self-preservation left not to stop at a field by the side of the road but not enough to check into a motel, if she was driving straight for Manhattan… she would have stopped here.

It's too many _if_s to stake both their lives on, but that's what he has. That's all he has. He walks forward, catches his toe on a root and barely manages to catch himself. The sudden motion rattles his head and his arm; he expels a loud breath but bites his tongue to keep from making a sound.

If she's here, and she hears him before he sees her – he swallows, shakes his head, tries to clear the sudden mist from his mind. Best to just be as quiet as possible. Best not to use a flashlight.

He walks slowly through the trees in the gathering darkness and then in the waxing moonlight, taking care to stay near the road. If she has her bike with her, she wouldn't have strayed far from the asphalt.

_If, if, if_, over and over. He stumbles again, catches himself, his head spinning, his muscles exhausted, aching. He should stop. Go back to the car. Sleep in the passenger seat. Keep driving in the morning.

He can't stop.

* * *

He's nearly staggering when it catches the corner of his vision.

It's so hard to see in the forest in the pale moonlight. The shadows of trees trick him - he's constantly whirling in circles, mouth dry, body aching from exhaustion and the painful pulse of adrenaline.

An odd shadow against a tree. The severe jut of what could be a handlebar, the sharply curved line of what might be a wheel. He tries to slow the sudden thump of his heart, tries to push the frenetic hope back down his throat.

He moves slowly forward. Painstakingly places each foot down on the long-fallen bed of leaves, curses every sigh and whisper of the forest beneath his shoes. Even when he goes from wishing to hoping to knowing, knowing that it's the outline of a motorcycle and that huddled at the front wheel is a different, softer shape, he makes himself walk, slow and measured. He doesn't want to startle her. It's not, it's_ not_ that he never wants to find out if something unimaginable happened and she's lying dead next to her bike in the middle of a Midwest forest.

And then he's standing right in front of her, over her, her body crumpled into a tight knot and so painfully still. The air is thick and suffocating, but he wills his breaths quiet and steady and even as he crouches to a squat, reaches out, finds the tense angle of her shoulder with his hand and squeezes firmly.

She shudders underneath his fingers.

Suddenly, his lungs can drag enough oxygen from the air.

He can't see her eyes, but the outline of her head tilts up toward him, slowly, unflinchingly. He'd thought (he'd hoped, he'd dreamed, he'd fervently prayed) that when he touched her she'd come up fighting, swinging at him, ready to combat whatever force approached her in the middle of the night. This, this poised, tense calm of her body under his hand, is something he hadn't even begun to anticipate.

"Hey, Castle," she murmurs, her voice hoarse with exhaustion and sorrow and an undercurrent of acceptance that rips at his heart.

She's still curled on the forest floor. He realizes it must be hard for her to move with his hand clenched around her shoulder, pressing her down, gripping her too tightly. He can't make himself loosen his fingers.

"You okay?" she asks.

He laughs, a harsh, strangled sound. "What do you think, Beckett?"

Her body lurches in a stuttering sigh beneath his palm. "Your arm?"

A breeze picks up, shifts a branch near them. He startles at it, pushes her harder against the ground. She yields too easily, she _lets _him press against her, and that more than anything keeps the panic coiled deep within his chest. "I think most parts of me have been better," he gets out, unable to do anything about the pained rasp of his words.

"Yeah," she murmurs, just _lying there_, and God he wants to shake her, wants to scream, because here she is crumpled on the forest floor with him crouched over her and she should be _something_, repentant or furious or anything other than dully acquiescent.

"Come on," he says abruptly, tugging up at her shoulder.

He doesn't want to let go of her, but it's too awkward for her to stand while he's still holding on. In the end all he can do is let his hand fall away from her shoulder. His knees crack as he straightens, his arm pulses, his head spins, but he keeps his legs under him, keeps his body tilted over her, as though he had any chance of stopping her if she actually wanted to run.

She pushes up stiffly, slowly. He hates how carefully she's moving. He wants to see more of her than just her silhouette, as if seeing her will actually help him understand her, as if he'll be able to forgive her if only he can look into her eyes.

When she moves toward the motorcycle instead of toward him, he can't quite stop his broken noise of protest, can't quite keep himself from grabbing the sleeve of her sweatshirt and tugging at her firmly. "Leave it," he growls. He can't believe that he needs to _say _it.

"Right," she murmurs.

He's not sure how far they are from the road, how well-hidden the bike is, but he can't stand the thought of moving it, can't stand even looking at it. He can hardly even stomach glancing at Beckett's slouched outline. He's fairly certain he's never been so angry.

He leaves his arm clenched around her sleeve as he tugs them forward in silence. He has only a vague sense of where the road is, and for a heart-wrenching moment he thinks they might be lost, but then he sees the trees thinning and the glint of moonlight off what could be asphalt. They stumble out onto the shoulder of the road. He can't see the outline of the car, but he's just oriented enough to turn left and keep walking. She follows silently, still doesn't even bother to jerk her arm away from him.

They're so exposed.

"You still have the guns?" he asks.

"Yeah," she murmurs, reaching into the waistband of her jeans, pulling out one of the Glocks and awkwardly reaching across their bodies to hand it to him.

He wraps his fingers around the cold metal as he shoves it into his own jeans, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed anywhere but her.

They walk, walk until he's worried that there is no car anymore, that someone has come and taken it and is waiting to shoot them from a tree and there will be no escape this time, there will be nothing but a fast and brutal end. His mind drifts, and he finds himself hoping idly, stupidly, selfishly, that if they have to die the first bullet hits him. He doesn't have it in him to watch her leave him again. Doesn't have it in him, tonight, to watch her fade away, not even knowing that he would be a heartbeat behind.

"That it?" she finally whispers, pulling him out of his haze, and yes, there, the low shadow of their sedan, seemingly untouched.

The relief feels more hollow than he thought it would.

He leads her to the passenger door, pulls it open, presses her down into the seat. She yields to him, pliant in a way she never is, in a way that rattles against every part of him.

He closes the door, walks to the driver's side, gets in, violently flips the locks down and the light on.

Her eyes are bloodshot. Her eyes are bloodshot and her face is starkly, terrifyingly pale, deep, bruised shadows beneath her eyes, streaks of old tears still too obvious on her face.

She shrugs self-deprecatingly. "If I'd known you were coming I would have brushed my hair," she says, trying for a wry smile, and no, _no_, she does _not_ get to joke about this.

"When did you last sleep?" he growls.

Her fingers pluck at a hole in her jeans. "About forty-five minutes ago."

"When did you last sleep somewhere that wasn't the woods?"

"Before you were shot." The way her voice cracks over the word shot – he simultaneously wants to comfort her and yell at her, because it was just a graze_, _a _graze_, and how can she not handle that when he watched her slowly die in the grass on a sunny spring morning.

He swallows the words. "When did you last eat?"

She shrugs. He just keeps staring. "Not sure," she finally offers.

"Was it when we last ate together?"

She dips her head once in confirmation, then, maybe feeling his eyes boring into her, speaks. "Eating wasn't really my first priority."

"Why did you buy a motorcycle?"

Her throat works as she swallows, closes her eyes, leans her head back against the passenger seat. "It was what I could afford," she says, her voice a low monotone.

"You could have taken more money," he grits out.

"I didn't want your money."

"What was suddenly wrong with my money?" He can't stop pushing, can't stop growling questions at her, can't stop the anger from thrumming through his blood.

She opens her eyes, turns her head to look at him, and finally, there's a spark of _something_ in her eyes, something that's more than the hopeless, anesthetized look she's had since he's flicked on the light. "Castle, I was _leaving you _after you'd been _shot_."

He'd been so expecting righteous indignation that he's not sure what to do with the open self-loathing in her voice. He ignores it. "You were going back to New York," he prompts.

Her head bobs in a short nod. "I was."

"To die," he growls, and damn it, his voice still cracks over the words.

"Not…" she starts, trails off, rotates her shoulders and looks back away from him. "To keep you living."

"Look," he starts, but she cuts him off.

"You want me to drive?" she asks, words dripping with finality. He's not dumb enough to think that his impromptu interrogation is anything but over right now.

"No," he bites out. He doesn't say _I don't trust you_, but from her long, slow blink, he thinks she might hear the echo of it.

* * *

x

Sooooo, we are going to be hopping over to the other side of the M line next chapter. I'm... sorry?

Extra special attack love snuggles to everyone who's reviewed/poked/prodded/tweeted/consoled me on gchat about this story; it fills me with all kinds of happy tingly butterflies of love and then the only thing I can do to get them to stop flapping uncomfortably about my intestines is just write more.


	14. Chapter 14

They drive in silence, the only sounds the whistle of the wind against the car and the soft shuffle of her breath beside him. He should be exhausted, should feel the burn of pain fizzling through his veins, but everything has been scorched away save for a clarifying, focusing anger.

When he sees the motel, he's been driving for almost two hours. He doesn't want to stop; he wants to drive until he feels nothing, until his eyes can be as empty and vacant as Beckett's, until he feels only the cold wash of numbness through his body, but he's worked so hard to get her back and it would be ridiculous for him to kill them both in an utterly preventable car crash.

"We're checking in together," he tells her after he pulls into the parking lot.

She narrows her eyes in what could almost pass as a glare. "You're going to have to leave me alone sometime, you know," she grits out at him.

"Watch me." He thinks he can easily never let her leave his sight again.

"I'll wait here," she says, her voice unflinchingly steady. "Or I can keep driving."

A part of him feels relieved that she's finally digging in, that maybe she won't keep staring out the windshield through such dull eyes. The rest of him burns, smolders with a contained anger that kindles and curls into his sternum, taking his breath away.

He gets out of the car, carefully, slowly pressing the driver side door closed, even though his fingers tremble with the desire to slam it. He walks around the side of the building to the front desk, pays in cash for their single room, walks out of the small lobby with the battered metal key digging sharply into his thumb.

He pauses before rounding the corner to the parking lot, curling his body against the concrete plane of the building, closing his eyes. The coiled, painful energy in his muscles needs an out, a screaming match or a physical fight or something, some kind of catharsis that will allow him to move again, that will stop him from shaking against the cool concrete of the motel in the darkness.

There's nothing. He sucks in a breath of air, shoves himself off the wall, and walks back toward Beckett.

* * *

He doesn't let himself think until he's shut the door to their room.

He's still clutching their bags. She stands behind him, a hovering, unavoidable presence. He knows she's watching him. He can feel her gaze crawling over the back of his neck, can feel the worry pulsing from her, and it's not okay, not when he's still trying to piece himself together because of her.

The bags fall out of his numb fingers, landing on the worn carpet with a soft thud. He whirls to face her, and the way she stands there so unflinchingly, so resigned in the face of his sudden movement, makes it worse. He lifts his arms, wraps his hands around her biceps, spins them around and pushes her a step backwards so that her body hits the wall with a crack.

The sudden flash of memory hurts, snarls in his throat – a week and a lifetime ago, pressing into her damp body in his home, their future unfurling before them with the loud snick shut of his heavy door. He sees the same remembrance in her eyes, in the dark swirl of pain that belies the unflinching clench of her jaw, in the sudden tension in her muscles. They've both lost so much.

She lifts a thumb, brushes it along the bottom of his throat. The touch jolts through him, jerks him forward towards her before he can even entirely register the cold, light pressure of her fingers. He hasn't felt her skin since she quietly crept out of their bed in the middle of the night.

He ploughs into her, lips crashing into her lips, nose colliding with her cheek, fingers tightening against her arms. She surges back at him, bites down hard on his lower lip, hard enough that the salty tang of blood courses through his mouth. Her tongue chases it, and he can feel her sharp exhale at the taste, but he won't give her a chance to think about it, won't let either of them stop to breathe and pause and reflect. He wants only the immediacy of her, the scorching, crackling life of her mouth and her hands and her body.

When she moans into him, just barely a catch and hitch of air in her throat, it makes him shudder with need. He can't press into her hard enough when she's still vertical, can't find enough points of contact with her skin. His arms are still on her biceps; he spins them around again, steps into her, walking her back to the bed, their mouths still crashing through their harsh kiss. He feels when her calves hit the mattress and crowds her onto it, uses his bulk to urge her up and then falls over her, the angles of his body jarring into hers.

He stretches up, ignoring the fiery twinge from the bullet wound as he pins her arms above her head, traps her ankles with his feet, rolls his hips down against her, scrapes his teeth over her lips. She gasps into his mouth, and he's got to be aggravating her fading bruises with her arms like this but he can't let go, won't let go, is never going to let go again.

He feels her palms curl inward, her fingers flexing underneath his as she shifts, struggles to get free. His bicep burns as he tightens his grip on her, presses her hands hard into the mattress. "Never again," he rumbles, spreading out the fingers of his left hand to hold both her wrists, traveling down with his right hand, lifting his torso to create an inch of space to get his arm between them, to fumble with the button of her jeans. A sharp, sizzling pain crackles through his arm with the motion, but he welcomes the fast-burning heat of it, welcomes all the different fires, pain and anger and arousal, that simmer just beneath his skin. His hand's twisted at an awkward angle but he couldn't care less, not when he's sliding his fingers inside her underwear and she's gasping beneath him, her mouth working at him, her teeth scraping along his jaw, the tendon of his neck, the center of his throat.

He lifts his torso, pulls back until he can meet her eyes, her unbearably dark, fathomless eyes that make him break apart even further. "What were you _thinking_," he growls as he shifts, adjusts, slides his hand further, up inside the slick heat of her.

She doesn't answer, just ducks her head back down, moans quietly against his larynx. "I'm not sorry," she gasps into his Adam's apple. "I'd do it again. Do anything to keep you safe."

He can't help the groan that's ripples up and out his throat - it's not okay, never okay, her leaving him will never be the way to keep him safe and he can't comprehend why she can't comprehend that.

She kicks a leg free from under his foot, bends the knee as much as she can with her jeans and his weight trapping her, growls, "Come on, come _on_," at him, and he's angry and heartbroken and terrified but he still can't stop the answering swell of need within him, can't stop himself from dragging his fingers out of her and fumbling single-handed with his own jeans until he's free of them, tugging hard at hers until they're further down around her hips. She growls in frustration, flexing her arms up against him, but he clenches his fingers tighter around her wrists. She lifts her legs, wriggling her hips, and it's slow going with his having one hand and her having none but he manages to get them to her knees and she takes it from there, shimmying to get them off her legs.

He slams inside her while she's still struggling with the jeans, and she keens, a desperate noise in the back of her throat, as she jerks her hips up to meet his. Her teeth sink into the junction of his neck and shoulder, and the bright pain of it spurs the hand he has between them to slide over her the soft skin of her abdomen and then lower, lower, forcing a deep moan from her.

She drops her head back from his neck, and he can't help but let his forehead fall down against hers, their lips a whisper apart, her jagged exhalations pushing into his mouth, filling him with the taste of her desperation and anger and sorrow and need.

It's too much too fast. He feels it swelling within him, crescendoing into a harsh, irregular rhythm. His fingers spasm around her wrists. "I can't," he gasps, but he doesn't even know what he can't anymore; he's too far gone to grasp at any kind of coherent thought.

"No, I –" she starts, but then she's jerking her head away from his, pressing it into his neck as she sobs his name and clenches tightly underneath him, every muscle trembling, vibrating tensely.

He's right behind her. He can tell from the bunching muscles of her forearms underneath his palm that her fingers are flexing, that she wants to pull them free, run her nails through his scalp, press her hands into his spine, but even now he can't quite take that comfort from her, even now, as he spasms and curses quietly against her temple, even now he can't take the quiet strength of her compassion.

It's not comfortable for him, lying on the harsh planes and angles of her. It can't be comfortable for her, the weight of him pressing her down into the mattress. But it's a long time before he can bring himself to move off of her, and in the quiet puff of air she releases in the wake of his retreat, he thinks he can hear a thread of regret.

* * *

Through the window, the inky darkness is giving way to a deep daybreak. He aches with exhaustion, but he hasn't slept. He knows she's just as tired, but her breath hasn't yet evened into the slow drags of sleep. They've lain apart, keeping to their separate sides of the bed, curled away from each other, a four-inch chasm of space bisecting them.

The long silence coils in his muscles, a claustrophobic, suffocating thing, and without conscious thought he's suddenly jerking upright.

"This," he says, pulling the crumpled receipt from the nightstand, the dark lines from her pen angled across the paper. "This is how you tell me you love me."

She rolls onto her back, shoves herself into a sitting position as she shifts to face him, her eyes dark and unreadable. "Kind of like your telling me when I was shot?"

"At least I wasn't the one who shot you," he hisses.

She exhales sharply, brushing a hand over her sternum. She doesn't understand. He needs her to understand.

"If you died," he starts. She's already shaking her head. "If they killed you. If you went back to Manhattan and they hunted you down and I found you shot to death in some alley."

"Castle," she whispers, trying to interject, her voice low, tight.

He won't stop. She needs to understand. "If I had to bury you, Kate. If I had to help your dad pick a coffin for your corpse because some _bastard_ on a power trip gave somebody some cash to murder you." His words roll into one another, gathering a sizzling energy that's too loud for the quiet dimness of the room.

"Stop it," she whispers.

"What do you think that would do to me, Beckett? You know me. Would I _ever_ just accept that? Would I _ever _stop hunting your killer?"

She's shaking her head slowly, back and forth, her eyes shining in the shadowed light.

He forces himself to drop his voice back down; he doesn't – no, he does want to yell, he wants to scream until he's hoarse and his words finally permeate her skull, but she won't listen to that. She'll tune him out if she thinks he's just venting his anger at her, and she _has_ to understand how deadly serious he is. "It would destroy me. That vortex, the one that keeps pulling at you, where the darkness claws at you and the only thing that keeps your heart beating is the need for vengeance – I felt it after you got shot. If you died - if you died now, after all this, it would pull me under. It would pull me under and it would drown me."

She drags her knuckles underneath her eyes, swiping at the tears that are streaming down her face. He won't reach out to her, won't run his thumb along her cheek. She doesn't understand. She needs to understand. "Your family," she chokes out. "Alexis."

"Even now," he says. "Sometimes I get wrapped up in a plotline and she calls me and I can't hear her."

"It's not the sa –" she starts, but he cuts her off.

"It would be worse. I couldn't write it out. I couldn't escape it. You _know that."_

"Your daughter," she says again, desperate, needing an assurance that he will never give her.

He reaches up, pinches the bridge of his nose, hard, between his thumb and forefinger. "Maybe she would be enough. Maybe Alexis would be able to pull me back from that darkness. Maybe she wouldn't. Are you willing to take that gamble with my life?"

"I just want you to be _safe_," she says, a sob tearing through the final word.

He can't help it, finally tilts forward, wraps his hands around her elbows, leans his forehead into hers. "I know," he whispers. "But you can't keep me safe by leaving me. You can't keep me safe by walking into danger yourself. You _can't._"

She's silent for a long time, her breath broken and jagged against him, her body hitching slightly. "Okay," she finally breathes, wrapping her hands around the back of his neck, her fingers pressing hard against his vertebrae. "Okay."


	15. Chapter 15

The sound of the coffee maker pulls him out of a tumultuous doze. Beckett's standing over it, a purple dress clinging to her waist, the hem brushing the middle of her thighs. He blinks, scoots up onto his elbows. She hasn't put it on since he made her buy it at Target what seems like a lifetime ago.

A hint of light flashes off a band on her finger. Sometime in the early morning he'd woken up to use the bathroom and stumbled over his pants, thought of her battered rings still nestled in the pocket, taken them out and put them on her nightstand. He's not sure when she put them back on.

She turns to him, her eyes glancing over his face and torso, her face crinkling into a tired smile. "Morning," she murmurs.

She's trying. He knows how hard this is for her. "Hey," he says, pushing himself up toward a sitting position, his arm twinging with the motion. He finds it's easier to smile back at her than he thought it might be, easier to lose himself in the upturned quirk of her mouth and the soft lines at the corners of her eyes than he ever would have imagined yesterday.

"Don't get up," she murmurs, whirling back around to pour the coffee in a mug, then turning quickly to him. Her movements are too edgy for first thing in the morning.

She leans toward him, handing him the steaming mug before perching carefully beside him on the edge of the bed. Like she's ready to stand right up, to bolt away in an instant. He swallows, chokes down the bitter train of thought with a sip of black coffee. "You sleep at all?" he asks, passing the mug to her so she can drink. After she'd agreed to stay with him, they'd tangled into each other in the bed, an exhausted mess of limbs and jagged feelings. He'd drifted in a haze, hyperaware of her every shift and turn, consciousness flaring through him with a too-hard thump of his pulse whenever he edged close to sleep, but every time his eyes snapped open she'd been there, sometimes her body quiet and heavy with rest, sometimes her eyes dark and solemn and flicking over his face.

"Mmmmm," she hums equivocally.

"Beckett," he says, his voice sharp. The shadows beneath her eyes are just as dark as they were the day before. Dark enough that they twist at his stomach, clench at something deep inside him.

"A little."

"Beckett," he murmurs again, can't quite keep the worried rasp out of his tone. His gut clenches tighter.

"You?" she asks, shifting toward him. His eyes catch on the low neckline of the dress, stick on the smooth line of her sternum, the swell of her chest. She huffs a short laugh at him.

He drags his gaze up to her face. "A little," he echoes, conceding.

Reaching back, she sets the coffee mug down on the nightstand. She rubs a thumb down his cheek, and he can imagine the circles underneath his own eyes, can see his own worry reflected back at him in the scrape of her teeth over her lower lip.

"I wish…" he starts, but it's useless, pointless, hopeless wishing.

"We have to keep moving," she murmurs, catching his thoughts before they've coalesced into coherency in his mind. She drops her hand back to her lap, lets it brush along his lips on the way down. "We should – let's call Espo. Before we go."

He can't help the flutter in his chest, the same stupid, pulsing hope that precedes every phone call to Esposito – maybe this time, they'll have found something. Maybe this time, they'll be able to pack up, drive to the nearest airport, and fly home, unafraid for her life.

She must feel something similar, because she snatches the phone off the nightstand with surprising speed. Shifting, she crosses her legs as she thumbs the power on, dials the number of Esposito's burner phone, flips on the speaker. He shifts closer to her, bowing his head over the receiver. Her hair tickles against his cheekbone.

Esposito picks up after half a ring. His voice is short, abrupt. "You're a day late."

Beckett exhales. "Sorry. We had some – interesting times."

"You're gonna make people worry." Castle hears his unspoken words – _I thought you were dead._

"We can't stay on long," Beckett starts, but Esposito cuts her off.

"Look – I can't – I'm not saying anything over the phone right now. But I'm off suspension. And we've had some recent… developments."

"What?" Castle snaps.

"Everyone's safe. We've amped up protection everywhere." Again, everything he doesn't say hangs in a silent beat – _We're safe. Your family is safe. Everyone is safe but you_. "Just – we might be able to get you home soon. But watch your backs." He weights every word of his last sentence.

"Espo," Beckett exhales, her voice heavy.

"I gotta go," he says. "But damnit, you two, _call when you're supposed to_. Day after tomorrow _at the latest_."

The line goes dead. Beckett slowly thumbs the phone off, then clenches it too tightly, her knuckles white.

"There's nothing we can do," Castle tells her. He sees everything he needs to in the firm and bloodless flex of her fingers.

"There's always something," she says, voice low, eyes fixed on the screen of the phone. Her words choke him.

"What are you saying?" His voice rasps just enough that she tears her gaze away from the phone, looks up at him.

"Nothing," she says, reaching out, running her fingers lightly over the line of his jaw. He closes his eyes at the contact, can't help it, doesn't want to see the desire to fight in her face.

"You said you wouldn't," he whispers, hardly aware he's saying anything until the words have left him. Said she wouldn't leave him. Said she wouldn't fling herself headlong into the abyss anymore.

He feels her other hand brush over his jaw, her fingers sliding up and over his cheekbones, then skidding down along the lines of his neck, her mouth sweeping oh so softly over his. "I know. I did. I won't," she murmurs against his lips.

His desire to believe her is a visceral thing, beating against his chest, clawing at his lungs. "I'll follow you anywhere," he says. Her lips are parted and he can feel her inhaling his words, can feel her fingers digging into his vertebrae as she curls her hands into the back of his neck. She's leaning over him at such an awkward angle that is has to be painful, but she doesn't draw away.

"I never wanted to hurt you," she breathes. Her fingers ghost down over the wound on his bicep, less painful today. It's her apology and explanation both.

"I know." He ducks forward, slants his lips over hers in a brief kiss before pulling back.

She chases his mouth with hers, sighs into him, "I meant it, you know." She doesn't need to tell him what she's talking about.

She must feel the stutter of his inhale - her hands tighten on his neck, pull him closer when all he wants to do is draw away to look into her eyes. Her mouth hits his before he can cobble together a coherent reply, and then she's sliding a leg over him to straddle his lap, sinking down until her hips bump into his. "Thought we had to go," he growls as her mouth and tongue work a trail of heat and warmth along his throat.

"Hurry up, then," she says into his ear, her voice rocky, scraped over gravel.

He slips his hand up the inside of her thigh, hits nothing but skin and then the smooth slick of her. "Beckett. Why aren't you wearing underwear?"

"It was on my to do list." She sinks her teeth into his earlobe, groaning as he tries to circle his hand, not quite getting the leverage he needs with her on his lap, so firmly settled against his hips.

"Don't talk about _to do_ lists right now," he says, mouthing along her jaw as he draws his hand up slightly and rolls his hips into her. He feels the heat of her pressing down against his boxers as he thrusts up again to meet her and they slide into a silent, jerking rhythm.

And then his breath catches in his throat because she's pulled away to give herself another inch of space and her hands are through the slit in his boxers, stroking with firm fingers, and then she's flexing her hips forward, sinking slowly down onto him.

"I love you," she growls into his ear, the words setting him on fire, burning away the ice of her bold pen strokes on a receipt crumpled underneath a set of car keys.

He's almost past words already, but he finds he can just get it out as she breaks around him – _Me too, me too, me too_ – and he's a stuttering, uneven moment behind her.

He collapses back against the sheets, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and pulling her with him, their legs tangling together awkwardly. She folds into him, pressing her nose beneath his ear, and he feels her laugh softly into his neck. "Was it good for you, then?"

"I am buying you a _thousand _more dresses," he murmurs, unable to open his eyes. He pauses, considers. "And then I'm burning all your underwear."

* * *

It's not a good day.

The jagged tension. The slow burn of exhaustion. The feeling of eyes on them. It's wearing on them both, slowly eroding them.

He glances at the line of the horizon, just turning dark, in the rearview.

"You won't see anything," Beckett tells him – again - her voice just this side of snapping.

"But you feel it," Castle prompts. He hasn't pushed her, yet, hasn't asked, but she's gotten more tense throughout the day, more willing to swing her gaze around at a flash of light, more ready to twitch at a sudden crackle from the radio.

"Castle. We're tired. We've had a God-awful couple of days. And then that call from Espo."

"Yeah," he murmurs, checking the rearview again, feeling the odd contradiction pulling in his chest, the thrumming tension from the day, the overwhelming swell of love for her. It's hard for him, sometimes, to put into words how much he adores her, how glad he is that she's here with him instead of anywhere else, instead of lying boneless and satiated in Josh's bed, instead of crumpled in a coffin from a long plummet off a high roof. It's even harder now, exhaustion and anxiety edging at both of them, pressing away all the words that matter.

She reaches over, draws a hand up to trail a finger over the back of his knuckles. He blinks, realizing his hands are planted at 10 and 2, his spine ramrod straight. He never drives like this, always slouches back against the seat, fingers from one hand resting lightly at the top of the wheel.

"We're just tired," she says again.

It's true. They are. He forces himself to drag in a deep breath, to stop glancing desperately in the rearview, to loosen his tight clench of the wheel. It's a gorgeous night, all slowly-shadowing grass and flickering fireflies and the first of the stars starting to wheel upwards into the darkening sky.

She drops her hand to his denim-covered knee, squeezes sharply. "We'll be okay."

"Why _do _we have to keep moving?" he asks abruptly. The question's been rattling in his brain since she first spoke the words that morning in their hotel room.

"What?" Her fingers twitch on his knee.

He gestures widely out the windshield at the vast stretches of space that surround them. "We could stop. Live under the radar. Buy a little bit of land. Some cows."

The sharpness of her exhale makes him flinch. "Castle. You were _shot _the day before yesterday."

"I know." He flexes his fingers unconsciously, feels the burn and pull all the way up through the wound. He's been able to distract himself from it, distract himself with his exhaustion and his paranoia and the vibrant force of the woman sitting next to him in the car, but sometimes the pain rolls over him in a great wave and he has to grit his teeth and breathe through it. "Believe me, I know."

"And all day…" she waves her hand, trails off before she puts words to the stifling sense of foreboding that's been weighing on them.

"But that's just it," he breathes in a rush. "Of course we feel like that. This isn't – this isn't sustainable, Kate."

He glances over to see her shaking her head in protest.

"We could be so careful. And we could be less of a target if we were a stable presence somewhere. We could be less easy to find than when we constantly show our faces to a string of different people, day after day, night after night."

When he glances back at her, her eyes are less determinedly resolute. She's staring out at an immense, dark field, at the moon just edging onto the horizon. "And the case?" she whispers. "Your family? Even if it _was_ safe, Castle, what happens to everyone else?"

"Just – not for forever. Esposito said things were moving."

"Could be anything, Castle," she says, and he can't miss the tension in her voice, can't miss how frustrated she is that they have no information at all.

"Maybe we can think about it," he murmurs.

She's too slow to hide the hint of wistfulness in her eyes when he glances over at her next. "Okay. We'll think about it."

Her hand tightens on his leg when he shifts to brake for a three-way stop, the first road sign they've seen in so many hours. Her fingers dig into his muscles, then dig in harder when he moves his foot back to the accelerator. His skin prickles under her tense grip.

It would almost be a relief, to have something happen, to have a valve for the near-explosive strain of it all.

He flicks his eyes over to her. "Kate," he starts to say, wanting again to find some words to tell her how glad he is that she's with him, how, no matter what, he wants to be by her side. But he doesn't have a chance.

It's not a relief.

The screech of metal, the crunch of the car frame as it buckles, the squeal of tires as they're plowed across the road.

It's not a relief at all.


	16. Chapter 16

"Beckett," he rasps.

The car's just slammed to a halt. The sound of crumpling metal still echoes through his ears, audible somehow through the heavy thump of his pulse. Save that, there's only the quiet stillness of the summer night. The stridulating crickets. The soft shuffling of leaves.

"Kate," he tries, and then can't wait, can't give her another half second to respond. "Come on. Kate."

"Castle. You okay?" Her voice is a key too high. Strained.

"Yes," he breathes out, more in response to the sound of her voice than to the question itself. He feels disconnected from his body – he spares a brief glance down at himself and he's fine, probably, no slowly-creeping blood visible in the faint moonlight. The hard wash of adrenaline won't let him take stock, won't let him cobble together a plan of action, won't let him think coherently about anything more than her. "You?"

"Yeah. Okay." She needs to start speaking in more than quick, rapid syllables.

He finally gets himself together enough to look over at her – he doesn't know where his gaze has been, vacant out the windshield, maybe. His eyes meet hers, shadowed, worried but aware. She's pale, but it could be just the darkness of the night and the thin beams of moonlight glancing off her cheekbones. He peers out at the front of the car – the headlights are still on, casting eerie yellow light into the forest. The hood is wrapped around the trunk of a tree.

They need to – he doesn't know. He rotates the key so the car's off, then twists it back to start. The engine doesn't even begin to roll over, won't even try to spark to life.

"At least we have practice crashing into trees," he says.

She huffs a breath, not even close to a laugh, but his words seem to ground her. When he tears his eyes back over to her, she's in motion, her hands reaching down, unbuckling her seatbelt. "We gotta go." Her words are low, urgent.

His fingers fall to the release on his own belt, push ineffectually against it. "I think mine's stuck. Maybe if I -" he starts, but then her hands are there, cold and purposeful, her fingers knocking his out of the way. He can feel her arms vibrate at his side with the strength of the pressure she's exerting. The release holds steady, doesn't give.

"_Shit_," she spits out, tilting over, leaning harder toward his lap, her breath catching.

And still, still, it takes him a moment to get to it, takes him too many heartbeats to understand the frantic thread of worry that underpins her tone.

This was not an accident.

"There's – there's a pocketknife in the bag in back, right? Or – shoot it out?" He regrets the words the second they leave his mouth. Too many memories are tangled in them, suddenly vivid now that they're trapped in a car, a crushing sense of danger swirling around them. It brings up too much - the icy swirl over the Hudson over his head, the sharp sting of betrayal, the shadowed almost-presence of an absent father.

She pushes hard against the seatbelt once more, growls low in her throat. "Knife's safer," she says, and he feels an unexpected wave of gratitude course through him at that. She strains toward the back, but he spares a glance and sees that where the bag's lying, wedged behind the driver's seat, she won't be able to get to it easily.

She huffs, turns, and climbs out of the car before he can think about it. As soon as her foot hits the ground, his stomach clenches. "Beckett," he hisses.

Swiveling, she ducks her head back down, meets his gaze. "I'll be quick," she says, and then she disappears. She's out of his field of vision for maybe half a second, but already he can't stop thinking, can't stop building up and breaking down various scenarios. He gets as far as one in which she draws her arm back to reach into the waistband of her jeans for her Glock before her hand is twisted roughly against her spine by a muscular, shadowed assailant.

He's so wrapped up in his worry over her that the cold, smooth pressure at his temple takes a beat to register.

"The barrel of my gun is at Mr. Castle's head," a man's voice says. Cold. Detached. Utterly emotionless. The gun maintains a steady, professional pressure. "Walk in front of the passenger headlight of the car and stay there." There's a pause, two thuds of his heart against his sternum. "Ms. Beckett. You have the distinction of being the only person I've shot with the intent to kill who hasn't died. Please don't make the mistake of thinking Mr. Castle will be so lucky."

He can't swallow, suddenly. A sleek seven inches of metal connect him and the man who sent a bullet scraping along the edge of Beckett's heart. His chest clenches. His fingers twitch, spasm on his legs.

"Mr. Castle, please remain still."

He drags in a breath, forces his muscles steady. "Sorry," he tries. "Forgot to go to the bathroom before the drive." He can't keep the strain out of his voice. The images won't stop cycling through his mind – her blood slicking out underneath his panicked palms as her eyes, wide and uncomprehending, locked onto his. The rattled tremble of her fingers as she tried to holster her gun. The flinch and drop of her body as the too-bright sun caught and refracted from a skyscraper window. He has never – _never _– wanted to kill somebody as badly as he wants to kill the man standing to the side of him.

He has also never been more helpless in his life.

Beckett walks slowly in front of the headlight, squinting into the bright beam. The slender length of her body is harshly illuminated, while the sniper remains shrouded in darkness. She's in a steady Weaver stance, her gun aimed unwaveringly. It doesn't make Castle feel as hopeful as it usually would.

He flexes his hips against the seatbelt, but he stills immediately when the gun presses more sharply into his temple. "Don't," the man says.

Okay. He blinks, flips through the facts. He's effectively restrained by the seatbelt. If he tries to break that restraint, the sniper will kill him. If he reaches up, attempts to disarm the man, he undoubtedly will be shot. Even if he didn't already have the facts (the too-close accuracy of the bullet at Montgomery's funeral, Beckett's clinical description of how intensely overmatched she was on that roof), the cold, steady pressure of the gun against his head is enough information:

They're dealing with a professional. A man who does his job and who is damn good at it.

But - if this is true - why hasn't he shot Castle yet? Why hasn't he killed them both?

Beckett's entirely still, but she's just close enough that he can see the worry swirling in her dilated pupils. Her gun stays steady, though, her forearms steadfast, her index finger tense on the trigger. "Might as well let him go, Maddox."

Maddox. It helps to have a name, though it's almost certainly fake, to connect to the cold muzzle digging into his temple. "No," the man says, simply, no explanation, no hesitation.

"Easier to make one body disappear than two," she tries.

Castle can't help the shudder that wracks him at her words. The pressure of the gun increases, hard enough to hurt, now. "I do insist that you remain still," Maddox says down to him.

"You don't want –" Beckett begins, but Maddox cuts her off.

"Throw your gun at my feet."

Castle can't help it. "Beckett, don't." Maddox ignores him.

Beckett blinks, but he can tell she won't entertain any action that might get him shot in front of her. There's a subtle tilt to her posture, an almost-indecipherable shift as she goes from cooly pointing her gun to frozen, desperately calculating her options, wracked with indecision. "If you kill him, I'll shoot you," she growls, but it's a buy for time and they all know it.

"You'd be dead before you get the chance," Maddox informs her, the awful possibility of it resonating through the dark forest.

"Do you only like shooting people who can't fight back fairly?" Castle asks, since his speech apparently isn't as restricted as his movement. Maddox stays silent, so he pushes harder, a stupid, desperate attempt to distract the man from Beckett. "Do you think about it, sometimes, as you're falling asleep? Do you dream about the look in their eyes right as your bullet tears through them and they suddenly know it's over?"

"No," Maddox says to him, one utterly flat word. Shit_._ "The gun, Ms. Beckett. You won't enjoy testing my patience."

Her arms lower. "Beckett," Castle calls, desperately, but he lets his plea echo and die in his throat. Maddox hasn't asked him to be quiet because, here, his words are not a threat. Here, now, his words have no power over either of the two people standing outside the car.

The gun barely makes a sound when it hits the ground in front of the car, but Castle imagines that he can feel the soft thump reverberate through every one of his bones.

Beckett stands in sharp relief in the headlights, her spine straight, her jaw clenched and determined, her hands so empty without her gun.

Her Glock is only five feet away from Castle. Five feet, a jammed seatbelt, a car door, a gun, and a highly-trained sniper away. Maybe if he – but the scenario breaks down before it even begins. There is no way to escape the unrelenting pressure at the side of his head.

"I'm going to shoot you with a tranquilizer gun," Maddox informs her. God. Oh God. "Remain still."

"Pleas—" Castle starts, but the rest of his words are ripped away when the flash of dart flies forward, catches her just below her ribcage, inches from where his bullet tore her apart the year before.

For a collection of breaths, he lets himself hope. Her gaze locks with his, broadcasting love and reassurance, and, for a moment, that is all he needs.

But then her eyes start to glaze. She blinks rapidly, but he can tell she can't get her focus back. Her knees sway, then buckle, her body folding down onto the leaf-strewn ground. He wants to shift, to tilt up in the seat to see her, but he's pretty sure that will get him a bullet in the brain. For a brief, hopeless second, he doesn't care.

But – there's one hope, one dim and unspooled thread of light. This man is a trained killer with no qualms about murder. He's not keeping them alive for fun. He's hasn't stayed his gun just to toy with them. There is a _reason_ they aren't dead on the ground, their blood soaking through the leaves onto the forest floor.

A different, smaller cylinder of metal presses suddenly, sharply against his neck. A pneumatic whoosh. A sharp sting. For a moment the night is so very tangible – the inky darkness beyond the too-bright streams of yellow light from the headlight, the sharp, clear scent of the forest, the presence of Beckett, crumpled on the ground, just out of his field of view. Then the world hazes, pulls apart into fragments of sensation, and the darkness rushes up to meet him.


	17. Chapter 17

He spins toward consciousness, his mind spiraling up and up through the haze.

"Kate," he hears, a hoarse, far-away rasp. "Kate. Kate."

Then silence.

His wrists throb. His shoulders ache. There's a tight knot in his side, a stich that makes him want to curl up into himself.

He can't curl, can't draw his legs up like he wants to.

He blinks his eyes open and groans, finally all the way up, though tendrils of fog still cling to him. His gaze first fixes on the hazy golden light, streaming through gaps in a high wooden ceiling. It's beautiful, the catch and swirl and lift of dust motes, up and down, back and forth.

He thinks the voice calling Kate's name was his.

He closes his eyes. He remembers.

"Kate," he calls again, panic strengthening his voice (the force of his memories behind her name, now, the bend and crumple of her body onto the dark forest floor), as his eyes snap open, ready, this time, to see.

She's here. Her body is stretched in a long, vertical line, her hands cuffed over a wooden rafter, the tips of her toes barely brushing the ground, her weight borne almost entirely on her wrists. There's a trickle of blood running down her forearm.

She's five feet from him. Maybe less. Close enough that he feels himself tilting at her, every muscle in his body straining out to touch her.

He can't move. He registers, vaguely, that he's in the same position as her, his hands cuffed up around a rafter perpendicular to the one she hangs from. The extra several inches he has on her allow his feet to rest more firmly on the ground. He tugs down with his arms, feels the pain stab through his wrists, down his biceps, feels the liquid fire under his still-healing graze.

They're in a lofty, dilapidated barn. Dawn or dusk filtering through missing wooden slats in the roof – he searches himself for any kind of hunger, but all he feels is an empty, roiling nausea, from the drugs or from their hopeless situation or from the thin trickle of blood winding down Beckett's arm. His mouth and throat ache from thirst. Dawn, he decides, because he doesn't want to think that they've been here for much longer than an evening. Dawn, because there's a certain kind of hope associated with the break of a new day.

"Beckett," he tries, pushing down the panic coiling tightly in his stomach. She'll be fine. They'll be fine.

He tries to make himself glance around the space. Tries to canvass the surroundings, take stock of potential weapons, locate all possible exits. But his mind keeps spinning off, hazing away when he needs it most, and every tiny loss of focus brings him back to her; every shift of light sends his gaze wheeling back to the limp lines of her body.

He doesn't know how long he waits, twisting against the cuffs, calling her name, his wrists and arms and head aching, but finally, a shudder runs through her body, then a long, slow twitch, and then she's kicking out, reaching with her feet to find purchase that she can't get. A low sound vibrates in the back of her throat, a small, broken moan that he can only hear because it's so utterly still. It echoes through his brain, makes his muscles jump.

"Hey, Kate, hey, don't worry," he starts, letting his words unravel in a steady, nonsensical murmur that fills the too-quiet air with something other than the shuffle of her feet reaching for solid ground.

Finally, her eyes blink open, muzzy and unfocused. "Cas," she rasps, her voice breaking off. He's close enough that he can see her throat working, see the slow, unsteady way she runs her tongue over her lips. "Castle," she gets out. "Where?"

He wants to shrug, settles for humming equivocally. "Your guess's as good as mine."

Her response is cut off by the swing and creak of the side door. Maddox steps into the barn, glancing at his watch. "You're right on schedule," he tells them, striding efficiently up to where they hang.

Beckett twists toward Maddox, suddenly focused on nothing but him. "This isn't about Castle." He's impressed by how much strength she's suddenly thrown into her voice, by the semblance of clarity she's managed to gather into her hard stare. "He doesn't need to be here."

He's gasping for air before he even registers the pain in the center of his stomach. He bends and curls, wheezing desperately, vaguely registering the sound of Beckett's voice but unable to pick apart the syllables into words. He registers that Maddox has spun and punched him in the gut, fast enough that he never saw it coming, harder than he's ever been hit before.

"Nice punch," he wheezes once he's got his air back. He wants the sniper's attention fixed on anything but Beckett.

Maddox ignores him, turning to stare intently at her. "Actually, my conversation today almost exclusively regards Mr. Castle. I can gag you, or you can allow us to converse."

"You don't need to gag me," she growls. Her voice is hoarse with anger and her eyes are flashing, but he knows, he knows that she won't do anything to get him hit again.

Maddox tilts away from her, back towards Castle. "There's a file that I'm interested in." He pauses, expectant.

"A file," Castle echoes, trying to keep his voice flat, emotionless. A chill twines up his body, filling him with a hollow kind of coldness.

"Yes," Maddox says, staring.

"I don't know anything about a file."

Maddox stares at him for a long minute, then speaks as though Castle hasn't said a word. "Mr. Smith, unfortunately, proved to be less than helpful. We found a deleted file on a computer in your loft that indicates you have a more extensive knowledge of the complexities of this situation than the ex-Detective Beckett. The rudimentary board she'd set up in her apartment revealed her lack of understanding of the powers in play."

Castle closes his eyes, exhales shortly with something that feels almost like relief. He can hear Beckett make a low, frustrated noise in the back of her throat, cursing him, undoubtedly, cursing him for his inability to keep himself out of this case. He doesn't want to look at her right now, doesn't want to meet her eyes, doesn't want to see the accusation in them, doesn't want her to see the relief in his. If it had to be someone Maddox needed information from – at least that someone could be him.

"We have reason to believe that some members of the 12th Precinct are now also aware of the existence of this file. Obviously, this places us in an uncomfortable situation."

"I don't know anything about what's happening in New York," Castle says.

"We know you've been in communication with Smith," Maddox informs him. "We'd like to know more about exactly what that communication has consisted of. Especially where it concerns the file on my employer."

"Why not just ask Smith, then," Castle growls.

Maddox tilts his head. "Not possible."

"You killed him." He's surprised by the surge of anger that fizzles through his blood at the thought of yet another man shot down in this desperate war. But - it doesn't quite add up. "Why'd you kill him before you knew where the file was?"

"Smith was an… interesting problem. A loner." Maddox regards him intently, slowly tapping his fingers against his thigh. "Occasionally, you need leverage with someone like him. Someone who's so determined to cling to his mission that he detaches from society. There's only so much power you can hold over a person who is utterly disconnected."

Castle catches Beckett's slight twitch in the corner of his vision, and he can't help but glance over to her briefly. Every muscle in her body is tense. Her eyes are dark, glinting with anger and frustration. He can see it in her gaze, everything she won't say aloud – _Shut up, shut up and play along, shut up and do whatever you have to do to keep him from hurting you._

"That's why, when we found your board, I was actually glad," Maddox continues. "Your mother. Your daughter. Your… erstwhile detective." He lets the threat trail off as he walks over, positioning himself so that he's standing next to Beckett and they're both turned towards Castle. "You have so many points of leverage."

"I don't know where the file is," Castle spits out, all wisps of the morning's eerie calm leaving him in a great rush. Panic claws at his throat, shortens his breath to a sharp staccato. He jerks against the cuffs, hard, blood surging through his veins with a crackling energy, terror rising up so suddenly that it's a physical, crushing force.

"I thought you might say that." Maddox reaches up to just above where the cuffs encircle Beckett's wrists. The light's just bright enough for Castle to make out his large hand wrapping around her pinky.

She's utterly still, her breathing slow and steady, her eyes clear and focused on his face.

The terror clenches around his throat. He talks, pouring words forth into the quiet barn, hoping to stumble into something, anything powerful enough to move this man away from Beckett. "Look, I have resources. Money. Connections. I'm sure there's something we can –" his words cut off abruptly as Maddox's hand jerks quickly backwards.

Beckett doesn't make a sound, but her whole body arches forward, her muscles contracting, her eyes slamming tightly shut before they open, fix back on him.

"What the _hell?_" Castle yells, the words scraping over his raw throat.

"Do I have your attention now?"

"Yes!" he shouts, unable to regulate his volume, pulling desperately at his cuffs. "Yes, please just –"

"The file," Maddox prompts, his voice unnervingly even, his eyes devoid of pleasure or pain or any kind of emotion.

He reaches over wraps his hand around her ring finger. The one with the wedding bands. Shit. Shit.

Castle feels himself lunging helplessly against the cuffs, feels the words spilling out of him, useless, hopeless words, words that he knows won't stay Maddox's hand, words that he knows won't make a difference. "Fuck, I don't know, I fucking don't–"

Maddox's hand jerks again. Castle's not sure whether it's his imagination, but he swears he can hear a soft snap echoing through the barn. He definitely hears a low noise echo in the back of Beckett's throat, a quiet, jagged growl of pain. Her body shivers, shudders as she bows backwards in a tight arch and then sinks down, her trembling weight hanging on the cuffs. Her eyes are squeezed shut, her forehead furrowed.

His stomach roils, bile burning acrid through his esophagus. He swallows. Swallows again, trying not to choke on the heavy knot of panic that's snarled just north of his collarbones.

Maddox watches him for a brief moment, but he can do nothing but try to draw in deep, even breaths. "This is not a game, Mr. Castle."

Everything he might say snags in his throat. He wants to plead with Maddox to let her go, wants to offer him something, anything that will make him stop, but he doesn't have the only words that can save her. "I don't know where it is," he whispers, unable to keep the heavy defeat out of his voice. Beckett's eyes are still closed, her breathing quick but steady.

"We'll see," Maddox says, trailing a finger slowly, lightly down her forearm. She jerks back as Castle again pulls forward, both of them at once straining at their cuffs. Maddox laughs sharply, briefly, the first sign of emotion Castle's seen from him. "You have a vivid imagination, Mr. Castle, but you'll soon find out firsthand that I'm capable of things you've never even dreamed of." He pauses, still standing only a few inches away from Beckett, letting his words soak into the stagnant quiet of the barn.

The trill of a cellphone cuts through the silence. Maddox pulls it out of his pocket, glances at the screen, starts walking toward the door. "You might want to try and think of where that file could be," he tosses over his shoulder as he walks away. "Soon enough, she'll be begging for just a couple broken fingers."


	18. Chapter 18

"I'm okay," she says as soon as Maddox steps outside, but the hoarse rasp of her voice betrays her words.

"No you're not." His throat aches. He sounds like he's been screaming for hours.

She swallows thickly, sinks her teeth into her lower lip, doesn't even bother to contradict him. "You?"

His only response is a harsh, dismissive laugh. He closes his eyes for the space of a breath, tries to center himself, tries to find anything to focus on other than the image of her body bowing in pain, jerking against her cuffs.

Her chest heaves as she drags in a breath. He can see the effort it takes to force her clenched jaw to loosen, to make herself exhale slowly through the pain. "Your arm. Your stomach. Hell of a hit you took."

"Christ, Kate." He can't get out anything else, can't stop his brain from imagining the jagged gash of agony that's somehow not yet rending her apart. Her arms and shoulders will have long since slid from pins and needles to a painful, aching numbness, her wrists will have started pulsing from the cut of the cuffs into her bones, and the throbbing lack of blood flow will have made the ache in her two broken fingers utterly unbearable.

"It's okay," she says, and the weight behind her words, the depth of her absolution, rolls through him in a great wave of grief.

"No. It's not," he chokes out, their conversation twisting in on itself, the loop of words reflecting their entrapment.

She watches him silently, her eyes dark, her throat working through a convulsive swallow.

"I don't know where the file is," he whispers. "I'd tell him if I did." It wouldn't matter that Maddox would kill them both, once he knew. It wouldn't matter that it could empower her mother's killer, that it could doom countless others to the tyranny of this shadowed man. He wouldn't be able to keep the burning knowledge contained within himself, wouldn't be able to do anything but spit out the words if their release could stop her pain.

"I know you don't. It's good that you don't know." The golden beams that haze in through the crooked roofing catch her hair, her cheek, the shaded edge of her jawbone, set off the murky swirl of pain in her pupils, the smudged shadows beneath her eyes; the play of the aureate light over her body is suddenly heart-stopping, suddenly utterly impossible for him to breathe through.

Oh God.

Oh God, he cannot watch Maddox torture her. He cannot watch her die.

"Kate," he chokes out, not sure what he wants to say, anything from _We'll be fine_ to_ I love you _to _Don't leave me_, but he swallows the words back. There's nothing he can give her right now, nothing that will make any sense in the face of what Maddox will put her through.

"It's okay," she murmurs again, her eyes finally focused, glinting with a ferocious kind of love that tugs at his chest.

"No," he says, a sudden, fierce determination clenching his muscles, quickening his breath. It's not okay, but it will be. He will fix this. There's another ending. There's another way to tell this story.

The door creaks and then swings open violently, slamming into the wall with a crack that jolts through him. Maddox strides back into the room, moving quickly, his steps too fast compared to his earlier cool and measured pace. His brow is slightly furrowed. One of his fists is clenched.

Not a good phone call, then.

Maddox doesn't pause, doesn't utter a sound as he stalks up to Beckett, grabs her thumb, and jerks it back, slamming it into the rafter at an impossible angle.

"What the fuck was that for?" he hears himself yell, but over the raw sound of his words is the agony of her short, strangled scream. He yanks again and again against the cuffs, but the old wood catches at the metal and he still can't get any purchase, can't move any closer to her. He doesn't even register his wrists are bleeding until he feels the sharp sting, then the tickle of blood trickling down his forearms.

Beckett's chest heaves as she gulps in frantic lungfuls of air, her eyes clouded with pain, her teeth clenched tight. Maddox doesn't even look at her as he moves back to the door, reaches into a small canvas bag, and yanks out a large, serrated knife. His eyes flick over her body with a cold spark of urgency that wasn't there before. "You seem like you'll last. You seem like you'll last a long while," he says, stopping in front of her, an eerie kind of hunger inscribed into the twist of his mouth. Castle jerks ever harder against the cuffs. "But when you're done, there's always his daughter." He turns and regards Castle. "Malibu, right? Bluewater Road."

The strangled noise that escapes his throat is almost inhuman.

Maddox steps back, grabs the hem of Beckett's shirt, and lifts it up, exposing the smooth stretch of her abdomen. Castle's chest clenches as Beckett twists away, lashing out desperately with her legs. Maddox's gaze shifts over to Castle. "I'll give you a choice. You want her to lose a finger or get a gut wound?"

Castle can't imagine what face he's making for Maddox to laugh so harshly.

"Don't worry, Mr. Castle," He reaches out, trails the blade of the knife lightly over the narrow taper of muscles at her pelvis before finally releasing her shirt. "I don't intend on letting her die too soon. I think I can manage not to strike anything vital."

"I remember," Castle chokes out. He thinks he might be crying, but he's too disconnected from his own body to tell. "I remember something Smith –" he breaks off, swallowing, his throat clogged in terror.

Maddox pivots slightly, his hand still clutching the knife but his face attentive. "Remember faster."

Castle sucks in a breath with burning lungs. He can do this. He can do this. It's just another theory, another story to tangle into the air, to weave into the morning light. He fixes his eyes on a beam of sun that spills over an old pile of hay. Strains to ignore the pained rasp of Beckett's breathing. "In January, Laura Cambridge was found strangled in the back of a sedan. The car was part of the motor pool at City Hall. Mayor Robert Weldon was the last one to use it."

"I sincerely hope you're going somewhere with this," Maddox growls, but he's angling away from Beckett, turning to face Castle.

He doesn't know where he's going, what he's doing. He only knows that every second he spends talking, every word that he can thread into a story, is another moment that Maddox isn't touching Beckett. "He wasn't a strong suspect at first, but the evidence quickly started accumulating. Laura had asked someone to secretly film the mayor. We found a video of her just prior to her death, standing next to Mayor Weldon, who was wearing the same type of clothing as her killer."

Maddox is utterly fixed on him now, tense, impatient. "I know this story, Mr. Castle."

"Then you know Mayor Weldon wasn't the killer, that it was his assistant, Jordan Norris. But you're not usually so up-to-date on local New York City politics, are you? There's a _reason_ you know this story."

"Find your point," Maddox tells him, but his eyes are sharp, intent, calculating.

"I met Mr. Smith at a parking garage up on West 150th, near Convent. He told me he was involved because if Mayor Weldon was indicted and no longer in office, I would no longer be welcome at the 12th. And without my presence at the Precinct, Beckett would be left unprotected." He wants to look over at her, but he won't. He knows she hears the awful truth in this part of his story. He doesn't want to see the accusation, or, even worse, the forgiveness in her eyes. There is no absolution for this confession, not when every choice he's made has led them to this place.

Maddox gestures with the knife for him to continue.

Castle breathes deeply, hopes that he has a strong enough foundation of truth that Maddox won't sense his lies now. "I wasn't thinking about it at the time – I cared more about keeping Beckett safe. I wasn't trying to find the file. But Smith told me to watch my back. That my presence at the 12th was helpful in keeping Beckett from her 'untimely demise,' but that the papers in that file were the only things standing in the way of her death, and that they were closer than I might think." He swallows, tries to drag some moisture into his parched throat. "I remember driving out of there, and a hundred feet away passing Home Storage Company, a run-down six story that for some reason stuck in my head." He's never been so thankful for the nonlinear way his brain works. He still remembers leaving the garage, getting stuck behind an accident next to the old brick building with the fading gold letters on the front of it, occupying his time by imagining the various objects contained inside, unspooling the stories of an imaginary vintage pair of eyeglasses and a hypothetical unused typewriter. If Maddox has someone check it, this building will exist; this story could give them an extra four, five hours. Maybe even a day.

Maddox is smirking at him, a wry twist to his lips that makes Castle's stomach flip. "You think the file's at Home Storage Company on 150th."

"Between Convent and Amsterdam," Castle supplies.

Maddox pulls his phone out of his pocket, taps at the buttons with one thumb, his other hand still clutching the knife. "That's nice," he says, lifting his eyes from the screen to meet Castle's gaze, the eerie smile still twisted across his face as he slides the phone back into his pocket. "But I don't believe you."

It's funny, what his brain chooses to notice, as time slows down and every frantic thud of his heart suspends in heavy space:

The slight whisper of the black canvass of Maddox's pants as he shifts his weight, preparing to pivot back toward Beckett.

The salty, vibrant tang of blood in his mouth from where his teeth have sunk into his tongue.

The clench and flex of Maddox's fingers around the handle of the knife.

The swirl of dust through the golden beams of light, the soft and quiet comfort of a morning that, for a brief and selfish heartbeat, he hopes will be his last.


	19. Chapter 19

He wants to go back.

He wants to go back to their one night in his loft, to the loose, free shift of her muscles under his palms, to the vibration of her throaty laugh against his lips, to the damp warmth of her skin beneath his body. He wants to go to a place, any place, where he won't have to watch, helpless and desperate, as Maddox takes the knife and -

He cuts the thought off, shuts it down.

Her eyes lock on his, purpose fizzing through her gaze, holding him in the present, trying to tell him something.

And then he sees it. His words have dragged Maddox from his relatively safe position, have slowly drawn him towards Castle, two feet away from Beckett (still too close, far too close), have made him gradually pivot away from her so that his back is now entirely exposed. To Beckett. To whatever plan is crackling now in the back of her eyes, intense and fierce and on the raw edge of agony, as she warns him.

When Maddox starts to turn back to her, Beckett's knees snap up. Her feet connect violently with his upper back, more power to the kick than Castle would have thought she could muster. He catches the brief flash of surprise in Maddox's eyes as the man stumbles forward, catches himself on one knee, more caught off guard than taken down, but then Beckett's hooking her legs over his shoulders, squeezing her calves around his neck, trying to choke him from behind.

Maddox's jaw clenches. His hands come up to wrap around her ankles, and he starts pushing himself up to his feet like her legs aren't even there, his face registering nothing but a blank determination. His hands pull out at her calves, start to drag them inch by torturous inch off his neck as he raises himself upwards. He's almost working for it - Castle can see the flex of the muscles of his forearms – but Beckett's legs are shaking violently from the effort of struggling against him and her eyes are full of fight, but now more and more full of a desperate kind of pain.

She cannot win this. She couldn't win against him on the roof when she was whole, when she wasn't bound to a rafter.

But, maybe – together.

Together they can do this, together in death or in a frantic fight for their lives.

Castle lunges forward, again and again, every muscle straining, shaking. The metal of the cuffs scrapes along the rafter, gaining him two, maybe three inches. Enough. It has to be enough. He wraps his hands around the rough wooden beam, his fingers slippery with blood and sweat, and contracts his abdomen, drawing his feet up and back, his eyes fixed on the struggle in front of him.

He lashes up and out with both legs, a frenetic, desperate kick at Maddox's chin.

The balls of both his feet snap up against Maddox's jawbone, hard enough that the pain of impact spikes violently through Castle's shins, up to his knees, hard enough that Maddox's head twists suddenly, sharply, and then he's falling, crumpling out of Beckett's grip, his dead weight slumping to the ground.

Castle's gaze locks on the body as he scrapes his feet over the floor and back beneath him, staggering into a standing position. He's not at a good angle to tell if Maddox's eyes are open or closed. The man's hand is still wrapped loosely around the knife. He might be twitching, might be preparing to get an arm underneath himself, to lift back up and drive the blade into Beckett's stomach -

Castle is still and silent for one second, five seconds, ten. There's only the harsh rasp of his and Beckett's breathing inside the thick and suffocating tension.

"You think he's out?" he finally asks, daring for a brief second to tear his eyes away from Maddox and glance over at Beckett. She's watching his body intently, but her own body is spasming, shaking violently against the cuffs, her lips pressed tightly together in a thin, pained lined.

"Don't - know."

Castle yanks again at his restraints. The adrenaline's pumping through him, making his muscles tremble, but he has enough awareness back to feel the brutal sting in his wrists, the deep wounds from where he's repeatedly jerked against the metal.

"We've gotta get out of here," he murmurs, his eyes lurching around the space, as though some solution will magically appear now that Maddox is lying in a heap on the ground.

"Any ideas?" Beckett asks, her words wavering and clipped, short with pain. And any second, any second Maddox could stand up.

They have to get out of here now.

"Working on it," he murmurs. He won't say _no _when her eyes are so clouded with agony.

"Right, then," she says, and then she's twisting, pulling against the cuffs, jerking sideways with her left elbow, her eyes squeezed shut and her jaw clenched tight and Christ he cannot watch this; he's going to pass out if she keeps wrenching her broken hand against the cuffs, just, _come on, Beckett, stop - _

"Stop, stop it, shit, Beckett, _stop!_" He lunges against his cuffs again, because he can't, he can't stay still and _watch _her fight against her body like this, but then her hand is slipping out, her wrecked fingers folding, collapsing into one another, and she's dropping onto her knees with a hard crack that reverberates through the quiet air.

She lands at Maddox's feet, but instead of scrambling away, she curls forward, her mangled hand pressed against her abdomen, the other, with the cuffs dangling from her wrist, clenched tightly at the top of her sternum. Trails of blood stream down both her forearms. Castle watches, dangling from a damn rafter, while she dry heaves into the dust, choking out long, sobbing gasps of air.

She's practically on top of Maddox's body. One more inch, one sideways spasm of her torso -

"Beckett, hey," he murmurs, the words welling up and tripping out of him in a useless litany. "Beckett, please, it's okay, Kate. Kate."

Her body keeps heaving, a horrible retching that shakes through her without ceasing. Her right hand hits the ground half an inch from Maddox's foot as she curls in ever further, her forehead nearly pressed against her sniper's knee.

"Please, come on, Kate, love, you've got to move." He twists ineffectually at his cuffs, vibrating with the need to be near her, to be able to reach out and lay a hand on her back, to be able to put his body between her and Maddox if the man suddenly awakens.

She's so close, too close, and Maddox _is_ going to wake up and she'll be hunched there, vomiting into the dust, and oh God, oh God he cannot just _watch_ this.

"Kate," he growls, agonized, desperate.

Her retching finally quiets to shuddering, gasping breaths. She glances up at him, her eyes red-rimmed, dark with pain, before tearing her gaze to Maddox.

"Need the keys," she rasps, moving even closer to the body, curling over his still form. She reaches across him, gently lifts the knife from his limp hand and throws it several feet away before her fingers stutter over his neck, hover over his carotid artery. The cuffs still dangle from her wrist. The metal bumps over Maddox's skin, jostles against the tendons of his shoulder. Her teeth dig sharply into her lip, her jaw clenches, but her hand keeps shaking, spasming with harsh, violent shudders.

She shakes her head, once, a small, frustrated growl vibrating at the back of her throat.

"Can't tell." Her hand stumbles down Maddox's chest, to his breast pocket, her fingers roaming, searching for a key that might not even be on his body. The metal of the cuffs trails behind, bumping along, sure to jolt Maddox into wakefulness at any moment.

"Stop," Castle whispers, the terror a visceral thing, clawing at his throat.

She rises awkwardly to her knees, her movement stiff and trembling, her left arm still cradled to her abdomen, her right hand fumbling into one of the pockets at the front of his jeans. It's awkward; she has to tilt forward and angle her wrist back and the cuffs catch on his belt so that she has to jerk on them.

"Stop," he whispers again, the word so strangled that she probably can't even hear it. He wants her out of here, he wants her _gone_, but he knows she won't leave without him, knows she wouldn't leave _anyone_ chained to the rafter while she saved herself, just as he knows that he can't ask her to take the knife from barn floor and drive it into the unconscious man's chest.

Her small, relieved sigh vibrates through the air as she pulls her hand out of Maddox's pocket and holds a small key aloft. He chokes back everything he wants to say.

She stumbles to her feet, pitching slightly, jerking her right leg out to catch herself. The toe of her shoe nudges into Maddox's elbow. His body jolts – or maybe it's just his arm from Beckett's foot, or maybe the movement is just Castle himself, making the room sway from how sharply he reflexively jolts against the cuffs.

"Please hurry," he murmurs, unable to help it, unable to stop the words.

Her face bloodless, hands shaking, she hums in the back of her throat in response as she walks over to him, and that worries him more than almost anything, the lack of any kind of retort when he's making desperate demands for her to move faster as she's in the middle of rescuing them both.

He exhales harshly, a short sob of relief, when she reaches him. She steps into him, stretching up, onto her toes, the length of her shaking body pressing against him, her forehead at his jaw, her exhalations fast and hot against his neck. He can feel the sharp scrape of the teeth of the key against the heel of his hand, just inches from where it needs to be. Those inches might as well be miles.

The blood on their forearms slicks together and it makes him feel it for a moment, the sharp pulse where the skin on his wrists has been ruined, the hot slide of both their pain.

His neck prickles, warms, a damp heat that can only be from her tears. She leans in closer, the scrape of her teeth against his tendon now, her mouth open and exhaling jaggedly as her body presses into his. "Please," he whispers, not even sure what he's asking for as he tilts his chin toward her, kisses the top of her forehead. It's not enough, it's not anything, but it's all he can give her.

"Can't reach," she rasps, finally, finally dropping back so that she's flat on her feet. She stays close, the crown of her head tucked just underneath his chin. He ducks his head, breathes in her hair, dusty from the barn and damp with sweat. It's not fair, it's so impossibly unjust that she's gone through so much and still, still she has to keep fighting. Her mother's murder and the gunshot to her chest and being hunted down and having that bastard break her fingers and now, even now, she can't rest.

She doesn't shift for a long time, doesn't move her head away from his throat, just stands against him, drawing in long, shaky breaths. When she finally pulls away, her eyes are wet but clearer, her body still trembling, but not quite as violently.

Staring up at his wrists, she huffs a short, frustrated sigh. "Might just have to saw an arm off," she offers, attempting a smile.

He swallows through the tangled mess in his throat, tries to cobble together an expression that doesn't make the horrible ache in his chest and stomach quite so obvious. "Somewhere in here there's a metaphor."

"Don't start with me, Castle," she murmurs, still trying at that smile as her eyes flick a little too desperately around the open space.

He drags his gaze off of her, sees it almost immediately about fifteen feet away, hates himself for seeing it. "There's – ah – there's a hay bale." He jerks his chin at it.

She turns. Her shoulders lift, square into a tense line. "Right. Should have noticed."

"Kate," he starts, but she's already walking away from him, stepping too close to Maddox's body (still lying motionless on the ground, but time keeps ticking, ticking away, and he's not sure how much longer they can count on their luck), then finally bends, wraps her good hand around the twine that holds the thick stalks of hay together. She shuffles it backwards, her back bunching and straining with the effort of dragging the damn thing across the ground. He splits his focus between her shaking body and Maddox's static form. He blinks, blinks again, trying to dissipate the sharp burn at the back of his eyes.

He's not sure how long it's been when she finally reaches him, pulling the bale up against his leg. A low vibration runs through his body, the strain from watching her fight so hard while he waited helplessly. She must see it when she glances into his eyes. "Next time, you can be the one with the broken fingers who escapes the cuffs and drags hay bales around a barn," she says through her heavy exhalations.

He tries not to let his face crumple at that.

She climbs carefully, shakily up, pressing the length of herself against him, and he feels something inside him release at the contact, at the slick slide of her sweaty, bloody hand past his, at the soft snick of the small key into the lock of the cuffs.

His shoulders drop, a fiery, fizzling pain immediately shooting down from them, through his aching biceps, pulsing forearms, throbbing wrists.

He wants to sit down. Wants to grab her and drag her onto the floor with him, curl his body around hers and lie there until they both stop shaking, lie there for hours and days and weeks, until they're both healed. He wants to take the key from her, unlock the cuffs that still dangle from her right wrist. But –

He makes himself step away from her. Forces his shaking legs to carry him over to Maddox's still form, lets his body slump down onto the floor, makes his fingers press hard into the pulse-point at the sniper's throat.

Castle slows his breathing, sliding his eyes shut, trying to concentrate. The prickling return of sensation to his hand and the quiet, exhausted vibration of his arm make it almost impossible, but he can wait, they have time now, he can wait to feel if there's a thump of life underneath his fingertips. If there is –

If there is, there's the knife on the floor, just feet away. He couldn't ask Beckett to do it, couldn't ask her to kill an unconscious man, but – the look in her eyes after the bullet tore through her chest. The still-lingering bruises on her neck, arms, shoulders, ribs. The desperate snap and arch of her body as Maddox broke her fingers.

Castle doesn't like to think of himself as a cold-blooded killer, doesn't like to acknowledge the darker impulses that are usually so latent in his blood, but he would relish wrapping his hand around the cold metal of the knife and pushing it through this man's skin and muscle and bone.

He waits for so long, his knees aching, his arms throbbing. He waits until he feels the warmth of her hand, pressed against his shoulder. He waits until he's sure.

"He's dead," he rasps. The rush of relief comes not from the words, not from the still and lifeless skin of the man beneath his fingertips, but from the soft and steady exhale of the woman crouched behind him.


	20. Chapter 20

"We have to go," he murmurs against the crown of her head.

"'Kay," she breathes, more a deep sigh than an actual word.

He runs a hand through her hair. "Kate," he says, trying to muster the energy, the urgency.

"One more minute," she slurs, shifting further into him.

They're slumped together on the floor of the barn, twined into an embrace that should be awkward - their bodies facing opposite directions, their hips jarring, her cheek pressed against his shoulder - but instead is only comforting.

After he'd made sure that Maddox was dead, he'd managed to unlock her cuffs and pull them off her wrist before they both tacitly gave in, stopped fighting their trembling muscles for a moment and allowed their bodies pool bonelessly onto the ground.

They're maybe a foot away from Maddox's dead body.

If his last phone call was any indication of the state of things, someone will be expecting him to check in. Someone will be expecting him to check in soon.

How long have they been sitting here, now? Three minutes? Four?

"Okay. Okay, come on," he says, pushing away from her, steadying himself with a hand on her shoulder as he forces his feet underneath him, rolls up into an unsteady crouch and turns so that he's facing her.

She blinks blearily at him, the past few hours, the past few days too present in her eyes.

"I know," he sighs, maneuvering his palms under her elbows, taking so much care to avoid touching her left hand, the hand that has stayed cradled protectively against her stomach ever since she got herself out of the cuffs.

She hums lightly in the back of her throat, leans forward at him, into him, her eyes unfocused, her gaze drifting hazily around the room.

"Beckett," he growls, tugging up at her elbows. "It's not safe here. You gotta get up." He briefly considers leaning over, wrapping his arms around her, picking her up and carrying her out, but his legs are still shaking and his shoulders and arms and wrists are still on fire and the graze on his bicep has set up a pounding, pulsing rhythm that radiates through his whole body.

"Not safe anywhere," she murmurs, her eyes slowly drifting shut. "Coonan, Lockwood, Maddox – they'll just keep coming. Always do."

He swallows against the meaning of her words – _Might as well stay here. Might as well give up._

No.

"I'm about to carry you out of here, and I'm not going to lie, Beckett, it might end in my dropping you," he says, pulling up more firmly on her elbows.

She blinks, blinks again, shakes her head slightly as her eyes finally focus on his face. "Like I would let you carry me," she rasps, gathering her legs underneath her body.

They stumble up together and then pause, just standing and breathing. The barn spins violently, the refracting golden light and the sharp lines of rafters and the dark slump of the body on the floor beside them, but the woman tucked at the front of his chin remains steady, his constant through the vertigo.

He feels her hand come up, brush along his forehead. "If you throw up on me, we're over, Castle."

He doesn't want to know what he looks like to make her say that. "After all we've been through?" The room finally settles, the ground lurching into something that he thinks he'll be able to walk on. He turns her, wraps his left arm over her shoulder and curls it around her waist.

"I draw the line at vomit on my body. Stop trying to sneak a snuggle," she says, voice hoarse. Her head is too heavy on his shoulder. She's still shaking.

He starts to walk them toward the door on heavy, disconnected feet. "I'm just using you for support, here, Beckett. You don't want to see me try to move by myself right now."

She's silent, but her right hand comes up, her fingers hooking over the waistband of his jeans as they edge through the door to blink into the blinding sunlight.

Somehow, impossibly, it is still morning.

A jet-black Escalade sits tucked just behind the barn. When he sees it he stumbles to a halt, tugs Beckett more firmly against his side. One of the headlights is smashed. The front bumper is crumpled slightly inward.

He turns them in a slow, slow circle. All around them is land – long, level stretches of fields, the kind of green that's flat and hopeless in the almost-midday sun. One long, dusty dirt road stretches away from the barn.

"Could be tracked," Beckett murmurs.

He blinks, shakes his head, licks his lips. God, his mouth is dry. How has it taken him so long to notice how thirsty he is?

Right. The car.

"I don't see a lot of options here, Beckett."

"Yeah. Okay." She pulls them toward it.

"We'll ditch it. Soon."

Or – shit. They have nothing. No money. No phone. No IDs. No guns.

And her hand -

He sucks a deep breath into lungs that suddenly feel too small, unable to meet the demands of the expanse of land and sky around them.

It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if the car is tracked. Doesn't matter if they have nothing. They can't stay here.

They stop at the crumpled hood. Her hand is still curled against the waistband of his jeans, his arm is still wrapped around her body, and for some reason, he can't seem to even imagine letting go.

"We should just…" he trails off, wrenching himself away from her in an abrupt move that has them both staggering, but he can still feel the magnetic pull of her, the way his body is already canting back toward her. He settles her gently back so that she's leaning against the hood. "Just let me check it out."

She murmurs something tired and halfhearted about his treating her like she's incapable, but he's fairly certain that at this point it's just for show. He scoots around the car, opening doors, peering inside. It's unlocked. The keys are in the ignition. There's water, granola bars in the back, a handgun and a sniper rifle in the trunk. Some sort of high-tech radio that he grabs and dumps on the ground.

When he comes back around to the front of the car, clutching a bottle of water, she's leaning back, her breathing deep, her eyes closed, her face tilted toward the sun. If she's noticed him standing there, she hasn't given any indication. He takes the moment, shuffles closer and bends down, stares at the hand that's still tucked up just beneath her ribcage. He hasn't looked at it, yet – he's been trying so hard not to see.

It's horribly swollen and already purpling, a deep black starting to spindle over the fluid-filled flesh. Her thumb is twisted around, curled in on itself horribly, her pinkie juts out at an awkward angle, her fourth finger is puffed around the rings, enough that they'll need to get them cut off her. Her whole hand seems to be locked in a tense kind of spasm.

She needs – he thinks there was a first aid kit in the trunk, maybe an ace bandage, and he might be able to find something to splint it if –

No.

She needs a hospital. She needs doctors to set her fingers and she needs about ten night's sleep and she needs –

"I know what you're doing," she rumbles, her eyes still closed, her body still slack against the hood of the car.

He snaps straight, feels a wave of dizziness pulse through his head at the sudden motion. "Hmm?" he asks, trying for his best innocent hum.

"'S a long way from my heart," she murmurs.

He swallows harshly, the burn in his throat worsening. "Tactless, Beckett."

She blinks her eyes open, stares at him distantly. "Sorry," she whispers, and he can see her gradually dragging the world back into focus yet again. "Car okay?"

"Seems good. Found some water," he says, twisting the cap off. It appears to have been sealed, and he's not really sure why Maddox would be carrying around poisoned bottled water, but he takes a sip, swirls it around in his mouth before passing it the bottle to Beckett. She takes a short drink, throat working greedily, before she passes it off to him. "There's more in the back," he says, nudging the bottle back at her. "Granola bars, too, if you're hungry."

"No," she says immediately.

He swallows the reflexive words about how she needs to eat. They both do, but the empty, hollow nausea still churns in his own stomach, and all he wants, now, is to leave this place. He watches her for an indulgent instant, the bright sunlight on her pale cheeks, the delicate lines of her throat as she tilts her head back to drink, the drying blood slicked along her wrists.

"Okay," she says, lowering the water bottle, pushing off the hood of the car. She steps toward the passenger side, then jerks to a pause. "Are you okay to –" She trails off, teeth sliding over her lower lip.

He won't let it hurt. He won't. "Kate Beckett, are you asking me to drive?"

She smiles, but she can't quite hide the exhausted tremble of her body. "Just don't get used to it."

* * *

He drives for three hours.

His vision's greying, fading and tunneling around the edges, but it's still not as bad as those first three miles of dirt road, when the car lurched over every bump no matter how slowly he went and Beckett's jaw was clenched and her face was bloodless and her hand was cradled to her chest and every time the car jolted, a tiny, nearly-inaudible hum of anguish would vibrate in the back of her throat.

She's sleeping now, closer to passed out, maybe, as the car glides over the smooth pavement. Her face is still bloodless and her hand is even more swollen. It's a wonder he hasn't crashed yet, dividing his attention between her and the rearview mirror and the sides of the road, sure that at any moment her steady breathing will somehow cease, sure that at any moment there will be another crack and crumple of the car frame, that they'll be drawn back down into the nightmare from which they've just barely escaped.

He drives for three hours because that's how long it takes to find a payphone.

He hesitates but leaves Beckett sleeping in the locked car, gets out, calls the number to Esposito's burner phone.

"Beckett?" the man says quickly, voice sharp, panicked.

"It's me," Castle murmurs.

"Tell me you're both okay," Esposito snaps.

He swallows harshly in the silence, tries to gather the words.

"Castle," Esposito rasps, voice suddenly hoarse, and he realizes how it must sound, his calling a day early from a payphone, Beckett not on the line, his sudden silence.

"Sorry, sorry – I'm okay. She's alive." He can hear Esposito's soft curse of relief through the phone. "But –" he swallows again, but there's nothing for it, this is it, rock bottom, the end of their rope. "We need help. We need to come home, or –" his mind stumbles, trips over it – "somewhere safe. A doctor."

He can't be making enough sense. His mind is muzzy, spinning. He can't remember his last full night of sleep – three nights ago? Four? He can't remember a time when worry and pain weren't constantly nudging the edges of his consciousness.

Esposito's said something, he thinks, but now the line is crackling with silence. "What?" Castle asks, blinking hard to clear the fog. He needs to concentrate. This – this is Beckett's life.

"What. Happened," Esposito growls, biting out the words, demanding his attention.

"Maddox," Castle says, but the words for what happened in the ramshackle, light-strewn barn keep slipping away from him. "He's dead, now."

He hears Esposito talking in the background, the far away, harsh snap of a command, and then his voice, low and firm, echoes back through the line. "Okay. We've got a trace on this phone. The FBI's gonna be there in twenty-five with a chopper."

For a moment, the words hang there, incomprehensible, in the heat of the phone booth. "What?"

He hears the beat of hesitation all too clearly, hears Esposito carefully weighing every word. "Just stay put for twenty-five minutes." A sharp, uneasy breath, and then, just before the phone clicks off – "We got him."


	21. Chapter 21

He jolts awake, Beckett's name falling from his lips as his hands reach out, grasping for her but finding only air.

He opens his eyes to the too-bright florescent light, his gaze snapping instinctively to the right. She's still there, her face drawn and pale, her chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm three feet from him.

A shadow falls over the bed. Esposito's hovering over him, a small grin quirking his lips upwards. He leans forward, squeezes Castle's shoulder sharply. "Took you long enough to wake up, Sleeping Beauty."

Castle swallows, trying to leach some water into his dry mouth. "Just waiting for you to kiss me, Esposito."

The cop reaches over, passes him a small plastic cup full of water. "Sip it," he warns. "They told me you already vomited a couple times, and that's one milestone in our relationship I'd prefer not to reach."

Castle grimaces, drinking the water carefully. "When'd you get here?"

"About an hour ago."

His eyes flick around the room for a clock, but the walls are utterly bare – suitable for a small, functional military hospital in the middle of the prairie.

"You've been here about twelve hours," Esposito tells him.

Stark, vivid memories stand out against the indistinct haze. The too-fast speed and too-loud noise of the helicopter, how he had to clench his hand on Beckett's knee instead of around her fingers because they'd buckled him in on the left side of her. The doctors, trying to pull them into separate exam rooms, the heart-stopping panic that choked him, blurred his vision as he hoarsely screamed her name. A sharp stab in his arm, the sudden wash of air and light through his blood. Drifting up to consciousness to find his wrists and bicep freshly bandaged, Beckett lying in the bed next to his, her arm and hand enveloped in a soft cast, her other wrist wrapped in gauze, an IV threaded into a too-visible vein.

He blinks, trying to clear his head, trying to prioritize his questions. "Is she okay?" He'd asked the doctors earlier, but they'd been brusque, refusing to give him the details he'd wanted.

"She'll be fine. Wrists abraded, severely strained shoulders, exhausted and dehydrated – all that goes for you, too, by the way, except your shoulders are in better shape." Esposito pauses, jaw clenching as he swallows. "Her hand'll be fine with time. They had to do minor surgery on her thumb and ring finger."

Castle lets his eyes slide shut for one heartbeat, two, three.

"Lucky Maddox's dead so I didn't have to do anything unethical. The feds picked up his body from the barn." There's no mistaking the combination of anger and dark satisfaction in Esposito's tone. It's oddly comforting, after so many days of feeling as though it's just him and Beckett against the world, to hear an echo of his concern in someone else's voice.

"How'd they find it?"

Esposito shrugs, quirks an eyebrow. "They were surprisingly motivated."

And that's the crux of it. Esposito's words to him over the phone echo through his mind yet again – _We got him._

He won't ask yet. Not with Beckett still asleep.

"Alexis," he says.

"She knows you're here and that you're mostly fine."

"Maddox," Castle swallows. "Maddox knew where she was."

Esposito grimaces, shrugs. "She and your mother _and _Meredith have enough security on them to stop anyone. Even Maddox, if he were still alive."

"You're sure?"

He gets a glare in response. "You think I'm gonna play games with your family's lives?"

Castle sucks in a deep breath, releases it. It's not okay, not really, but it will have to be for now. "How are we here?"

The cop pauses, flicking his eyes over to Beckett. "I'll explain when she wakes up," he says.

"But it's –"

Esposito cuts him off with a sharp shake of his head. "You can wait for her," he says.

Right.

Castle sighs, dips his chin in acknowledgement, because of course Esposito's right. Her mom. Her case. Her demons. He turns in the bed to watch her, her pallid cheeks, bandaged arm, too-prominent clavicles. He wills her to wake up, but the steady ease of her breathing has him soon exhaling in the same rhythm, and then his eyes are drifting shut, his limbs weighting down, down, and then there's only the quiet drift of darkness.

* * *

When he wakes again it's darker, a small lamp in the corner of the room radiating the only light - just enough to glance off her face, her dark and serious eyes that watch him intently, her shadowed, slightly-bruised jawbone. Her body is curled in on itself, her knees folded up toward her stomach, her arms tucked underneath her chin, the bulk of the soft cast up against her chest. Her IV is out, its only echo the folded piece of gauze taped at her inner elbow.

Someone has pushed their beds so that they're directly next to each other, the metal railings bumped up against one another, so that, if he reached out, he could touch her. He's lying cramped on his side, facing her, the arc of his body mirroring hers. He takes a moment, stretches his legs down, slowly lengthens his torso, breathes through the throbbing ache in all his muscles, the harsh pound of blood through the veins of his wrists and arms.

Her eyes, hollow and haunted, stay fixed on him.

"Hey," he murmurs, trying for a smile, reaching a hand over the railings, his fingers jolting inelegantly into the cracked skin of her elbow.

"Hey," she breathes, barely an exhale.

"Who moved the beds?" he asks to fill the empty space left by her whispered word.

"Esposito." She pauses, licks her lips. "He's just outside, now. Wanted to read in the light." He waits, knowing there's more, waits until she continues in her cracked, hushed monotone. "I wasn't sleeping so well."

Esposito had moved the beds closer because she'd had a nightmare.

She must see the realization scrawled across his face; she reaches for a smile that only goes as far as her slightly upturned lips. "Just used to you hogging the covers," she says, but, damn, the empty echo of her voice lodges in his chest, overwhelming him. He shifts, pressing his body up against the metal railing, trying to capture a little more of the cool skin of her arm beneath his fingertips.

"Kate," he murmurs, reproachful.

She's silent for a long, long moment as he feathers his hand over her arm, reveling in the quiet life of her skin, the dormant energy and heat of her body. "I just feel so empty," she finally whispers, so softly he thinks he might not have even heard it. She rubs her bandaged hand over the scar on her sternum, her eyes glistening in the dark.

He won't cry. "I know," he says, running his fingers over her arm, ever higher, until they're stopped by the bulky bandage that covers her wrist and hand. It's not enough. He suddenly, viscerally needs more of her.

He shoves his body up to an elbow and a knee, feels the deep, aching protest in his wrist, bicep, shoulder, doesn't let it stop him as he presses himself upward, starts to roll over both the railings. She realizes what he's doing just in time, releases a small, alarmed squeak and scoots over, giving him barely enough space to launch awkwardly into in her hospital bed.

He's not quite sure how he does it without seriously injuring either of them, but he winds up lying on her narrow bed, half hovering over her, staring down into her eyes, dark and bleak and trusting and _wanting_.

She reaches up, tangles her fingers in the hair at the back of his head, drags his lips down to hers and then just rests there, breathing him steadily in.

"Esposito," he murmurs against her mouth.

He can feel her smile as she nudges her nose up softly into his. "Hell of a wrong name to call, Castle."

The laugh ricochets in his throat, dies abruptly. "Kate..."

"This first," she hums in response, brushing her lips slowly over his.

He has to swallow it back, the swell of gratefulness so profound it chokes him – Esposito is right there, right outside with the name of her mother's killer, with the answer to what has been the driving force of her life for thirteen years, and here she is, underneath him, saying _this first._

She blinks at him slowly, her eyes still too full of desolation.

"He's right outside," Castle murmurs, deliberately skirting it. Nothing he can say will match those two words from her. _This first._

"Be quiet, then," she says, wrapping her uninjured hand around his forearm, pulling it down, pressing his palm flat against the outside of her thigh.

His breath stutters and dies in his chest as she pushes her palm up underneath his hospital gown, rakes her fingers lightly over his abdomen.

He doesn't move, just hovers tensely, half above her, his lips a whisper away from hers, his fingers curved into the too-cool skin of her thigh, his abdomen rippling from the feather-light trail of her hand.

Her face is still so pale.

"Beckett," he murmurs, a warning, as her fingers trip down, tracing a circling path around his navel.

"I thought," she whispers, her hand moving ever downwards, "I thought I was going to have to watch. As he…" she trails off, shakes her head. "And then, when he came over to me, when he broke my finger – God, Castle, I was just so _relieved_."

His fingers tighten on her thigh. His stomach is clenched in grief, in arousal. Her hand won't stop tracing delicate patterns over his skin.

"And I felt horrible about that. I felt so – selfish. Being so relieved that _you _were the one who had to watch, and not me."

He lowers himself a centimeter, slants his lips over her and presses his tongue into her mouth, slides his hand over her quad to the inside of her thigh and skims up, up, anything to get her to stop talking. Anything to banish the too-vivid recollection of those sickening heartbeats in the golden light when Maddox realized that the best way to get to him was through _her_.

She moans into his mouth, a needy, broken sound that washes away his reservations, even though they're in a hospital where Esposito or a nurse or a doctor or _anyone_ could just come walking through the door, even though her hand is still shaky and the wrist encased in the bulky cast still lies inert on her chest.

None of it matters. She is here, beneath him, alive, wanting him, and none of the rest of it matters.

He skims his hand further up the inside of her thigh, his fingers gentle, teasing; she wraps a firm palm around him in retaliation, smiling as his hips jerk down toward her. His wrists and shoulders ache with a fire that's almost cleansing, but he can't help but worry about her, if she's well enough, if she has the balance to walk this razor's edge of pain with him. Then his index finger trails lightly over the crease of her thigh and her hips thrust sharply towards him and that's enough, the echo of his own coiled want so obvious in her, that's enough to spur him forward.

He flattens his palm against her, eases into slow circles as her hand moves over him in a gentle and steady rhythm. A needy, relieved whine escapes him, and she tilts her head up, swallows the sound with her mouth.

"Shhh," she whispers.

He retaliates by dipping a finger up into her. She cuts off her moan into a sharp gasp, tightening her hand around him.

"You shhh," he whispers, surprised by how destroyed his voice sounds, wrecked with desire and grief and relief.

"I'm not," she starts, but then he's dipping a second finger into her and quickening his rhythm and she arches, her mouth opening, soundless, her teeth scraping over his jaw as her hand quickens in return.

It's fast and intense and almost painful when he breaks a moment ahead of her, biting her name out quietly into the soft skin of her temple. When she silently rocks and clenches around his fingers, her chest is heaving and her eyes are shining with tears that he knows she won't let fall.

It's too much and not enough; he presses his forehead forward against hers, breathing through the ache in his chest. When he draws back, glancing down at her, her eyes are no longer empty, instead full of pain and a raw, kinetic kind of love.

"Beckett," he murmurs to her, lifting a hand to brush away a lock of sweaty hair at her temple. "I don't want to alarm you," – he sees the way her breath hitches, the sudden wary tension in her jaw – "but I think there are unicorns on your hospital gown."

She flashes him a small, grateful smile. "The nurse apologized when she was taking out my IV. Screw up with the last shipment meant they were running low, so patients who'll fit are getting the kid's gowns."

He drops his hand back down her body, trails his fingertips over the muscles of her quad. "I approve of the length."

She reaches up, shoves him lightly in the shoulder. "Get back into your bed. If Esposito sees this we'll never hear the end of it."

He tries not to be hurt by it – he knows it's true, they can't lie comfortably next to each other in the narrow bed anyway, and he'd be almost as horrified as she'd be if Esposito walked in on them like this, but still, he doesn't want that extra foot of space between them.

"Just – just for now," she whispers, brushing her lips lightly over his, her kiss full of love and absolution.

* * *

He drags his eyes back open to a soft, lilting noise reverberating through the room. For a moment he's disoriented – the harsh lights, blank walls, sterile smell, and then it all at once comes rushing back.

He hadn't meant to fall asleep after climbing back into his own bed. He'd only wanted to close his eyes, just breathe and rest for an instant before calling Esposito back into the room, but his body had been sated, heavy, and he'd responded almost instantly to Beckett's whispered command to rest.

Esposito's leaning over Beckett's bed, now, talking to her in a quiet murmur. Both his hands rest on the railing, but there's something about the attentive arc to his back, the gravelly worry in his voice, that sends a ridiculous starburst of jealousy through Castle's chest.

He's not used to sharing her anymore.

He coughs, clearing his throat far too obviously as he reaches for a cup of water.

"You guys start without me?" He winces – it sounds worse than he intended.

Beckett turns her head to him, blinks reproachfully. "We were waiting for you to wake up."

The slight embarrassment is washed away by the clench of anxiety deep in his stomach. Thirteen years of her life and at least one of his have been consumed by this quest, this quest that now, finally, has an ending, has an answer.

Esposito steps back, pivoting slightly so that he's facing both of them.

"Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Long."

Beckett's eyes slam shut, stay that way for a long moment as she inhales, exhales, every push and pull of air carefully measured. He's not sure what he should feel – surprise, maybe, or curiosity, or relief, but all he has room for is an overwhelming concern over her.

Oh. Except – the otherwise unassuming surname. "Long. As in the transliteration of the Mandarin word for Dragon." There's an odd kind of guilt twisted up in that realization – wordplay's his arena, and he's never even considered it.

Beckett's fighting her way out of wherever she is in her mind, but Esposito sees it, shakes his head. "Long's a common surname, Castle. Don't be an idiot about it."

That drags Beckett's eyes over to him; she gives him a small, twisted smile, silently agreeing with Esposito, absolving him with the upturned quirk of her mouth.

"You're sure," she pushes, voice stronger than he would have expected.

Esposito nods sharply. "Smith had a failsafe set up. Every ten days, he made a call –" Beckett's face grows more pale, falls with his words. It takes Castle a moment of mental fumbling to catch up. This isn't knowledge that people have passively been holding back. This is active: a rhythm of betrayal, marked out in regular phone calls, and Castle is entangled in all of it, in hushed meetings in dark parking garages and in whispered phone calls. The worst part is he isn't even sure what he'd do differently if he were given the chance.

Esposito's still talking, and he forces his focus back on the words – his story is snarled into theirs, irretrievably, inseparably tangled into it, and he needs to hear it. "—so the files went to your man –" he jerks his chin at Castle – "Weldon."

Castle exhales sharply. If he'd known his story in the barn was so close to the truth, he never would have had the guts to tell it – except that yes, he would have, of course he would have, anything to keep her from getting hurt even for a moment longer.

"Makes sense in retrospect – the guy has a relationship with both of you and has been collateral in this whole tangled mess – but of course we didn't know it at the time. We knew there was a file, and Long's people obviously knew there was a file, and it turned into a messy race to find it."

"Messy?" Beckett asks, voice strained.

"Martinez and Haines didn't make it. Eight others wounded. Officer Haskell's the only one who's not out of the woods." Esposito's jaw clenches, chin dips. "Ryan got shot in the thigh."

"What?" Beckett breathes, her breath stuttering in short, irregular bursts.

Esposito chooses the easiest response. "Ryan's fine. They're releasing him today, and you know how Jenny is, hasn't left his side."

"What _happened_?" Beckett bites out. She's more pale than she was, and he can see her hands shaking, the muscles of her shoulders trembling. Maybe they should have waited. This is important, yes, this is important and they need to know it, but not when she's looking like this, like every word is causing her to shatter just a little bit more.

"We figured out the pattern of every-ten-day phone calls to a burner right around the time Long's people started becoming a more visible presence – that was the last morning I talked to you. We'd found one of their rooms in an old hotel, figured out that they had basically the same information as us and then some. They'd been trying to catch up with you – had a grainy picture of you paying for gas in a convenience store. A report of people matching your description buying a '96 Mustang in a used car lot."

"Because they thought we might lead them to the file," Beckett murmurs.

"Near as we could figure. Of course, the game changed when we thought something might happen with the file on the tenth day. Ryan wanted to pull you back in the second we found their intel on you, and Gates agreed, but, Christ, we'd already seen some tentative evidence for ties back to the CIA and we weren't sure where you were _or_ who we trust to bring you in."

He pauses, exhales sharply. Beckett's entire being is focused on him, her lower lip pulled between her teeth, her jaw clenched.

"Weldon came to Ryan and me with the file – apparently you'd said enough about us, Castle, that he trusted we weren't dirty - but Long's people had eyes on us, or on us and him, we're still not entirely sure. We had a hell of a scuffle – that's where our casualties happened - but we got it."

His heart thuds in his chest at the images flashing through his mind, the gun battle in Manhattan that could have killed his friends, that did kill some officers.

He wishes Beckett would lean back. She's so rigid, her body strained and upright, a hard shake present in all of her muscles.

Esposito must see it; he keeps watching her with concern, but he probably knows he's too far in to stop now. "The file provides evidence of Long's ties to the murders of Johanna Beckett, Jennifer Stewart, Diane Cavanaugh, and Scott Murray, as well as gunrunning ops from New York to Columbia and Pakistan. Gotta hand it to Gates – she handled it just right; didn't try to go internally or through any of the chain of command at the DoD. She knew enough to pull the right strings, made a few phone calls to some old fed friends she has, and had _the _Inspector General for the DoD involved in less than two hours."

"Is it enough?" Beckett breathes.

"It's enough to prosecute as it stands right now. They're still building a case. But – yeah – we're pretty sure it's enough."

She exhales, slumps back against the pillows.

There's so much left to explain, so very many loose threads from this horrible mess of a case, but when Esposito glances at him, Castle can only think of one question that matters. "So she's safe?"

Esposito stills, stays silent.

Castle swallows against it, locking his eyes with the cop's, tries it again as a statement. "So she's safe. We can go home."

He can see, in the corner of his vision, Beckett curved back against the pillows, exhausted – she has _her_ answer, but this question, this question has always been the part of the story he cares about the most. Fuck the Dragon, fuck the entire conspiracy – ultimately, this question has always been _his_ endgame.

"Just _say it,_" he snaps, nearly yelling, his muscles vibrating with the urge to get out of the bed, to throw something breakable across the room.

Esposito sighs, his shoulders slumping slightly. "We have Long in custody, and at this point we're pretty sure he's not getting out. But he wasn't a one-man show, Castle – this guy has a network of connections, and we're still not entirely sure how deep it goes. We know enough about it now that we can find out more."

"But until you do, she still has a target on her," Castle extrapolates. The thought of it – all this, all this they've been through and she's still not safe, still might never be safe –

He clenches his hand, forces himself to exhale steadily - he's seen some of the worst, seen it in the tortured arc of her body in that barn, but she's here now, beside him, shaken but not broken, and as long as these things are true it's okay. Together they can make it. Together they can do anything.

"We know more now," Esposito's saying, "about who we can trust. Gates is already working with some people we trust at the FBI to set up a highly secure place for you to stay."

He opens his mouth to ask more questions, but Esposito cuts his eyes sharply over to Beckett, her ashen face, her shadowed eyes that keep slipping shut. She needs to rest.

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," she murmurs, as if she can sense their attention, but her voice is broken, exhausted.

Still – "What about –" Castle starts, but Esposito cuts him off.

"Later. Right now, rest." He regards Castle for an instant, then sighs, shakes his head. "Took into account what you said about Martha and Alexis. They and Meredith are about to get on a plane to a little island in the Marquesas, along with enough security to form a small platoon."

Castle swallows, relief and disappointment swelling in his throat. He trusts this man with his family's lives, he trusts that they'll be safe, but he couldn't help but hope that they would be reunited, that he'd see his daughter soon.

Beckett's eyes have struggled open, and she's watching him, a shadow of guilt dancing at the back of her gaze. He jerks his head, clearing his thoughts.

"Thanks," he tells Esposito. _Thanks_. It's ridiculous, asinine, really – if it wasn't for Esposito, for their team, fighting this war back at home, they would still be out there, driving in Maddox's car, alone, hunted, with Beckett's – he stops himself, swallows around the gratefulness that's snarled in his chest.

Esposito smiles at him as he backs out of the room, flicking his eyes over to Beckett, whose eyes have closed and whose breathing has evened into the slow drags of sleep. "You got it," he mouths as he steps out the door.

It's silent for a long moment, and Castle briefly weighs the pros of launching himself back into her hospital bed, but in the end he settles for reaching out, hooking a pinky into the collar of her hospital gown, just at the edge of the pale purple tip of a unicorn's horn, his knuckle brushing against the reassuring jut of her clavicle.

She sighs lightly, canting her body toward his, and the solid force of her presence lulls him slowly into sleep.


	22. Epilogue

He finds her, like always, at the ocean.

During their first week here, they'd tried to convince her to stay closer to the house. Harwood, the head of their security team, had insisted upon it, had told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was not to go near the water, that that perimeter couldn't be fully secured. But the guards on the night shift wouldn't stand up to her like that, and she'd wound up slipping away in the moonlight, wading up to her waist in the ocean, until, half an hour later, Greene had finally come in and shook him awake. She'd let Castle take her back inside, let him towel her off without a word, let him curl his torso over her shaking body and press some warmth back into her skin.

They'd relented after that night, set up an extra two guards to trail her down to the water when she went. She'll sometimes spend long hours on the rocky shoals, the tips of her toes dipped into the frigid water – as the daylight starts dwindling and summer twines to a close, the ocean that laps against their shore in northern Maine shores stays cool.

She's up to her thighs today. Didn't bother rolling up her jeans, just let them soak in the sea. Her hair is down, impractically, the ocean breeze catching and tangling it. She's trailing the tips of her fingers lightly through the sun-splashed water. Her left hand moves awkwardly, her wrist still in a light splint.

He wades into the sea, lets his legs adjust to the cold and brutal sting of the water, then slowly, so slowly, brushes his fingers along the sweep of her shoulder.

Early on, one of the first days, he'd made the mistake of reaching out, wrapping his hand around her wrist. He'd wound up on his back with the wind knocked out of him, Beckett, hovering above him, her eyes dark with panic but apologies already spilling from her mouth.

Her trauma has a certain kind of brittle elegance to it, the way she holds herself apart, now, from the guards, from the doctor, sometimes even from him. The way she breathes deeply and steadies herself before letting anyone touch her. He'd wanted to bring a therapist in, for her, for them both, but already Harwood was barely comfortable with the doctor who sporadically travels in to check her fingers.

"Thought you were napping," she murmurs. He'd written well into the night, hadn't stumbled into bed until the sky was threaded through with dawn light.

"Missed you."

She turns, faces him, her eyes flicking searchingly over his face. "Another one?" she breathes, stepping into him.

His trauma is far less graceful than hers. It's dragged out of him when he sleeps, in jagged, raw nightmares that twist him awake. She's right to be surprised – he'd already woken them this morning when, barely after he'd gotten to sleep, he shot upright with a hoarse shout. Usually he'll get a brief respite, two nights, sometimes even three or four, between the dreams.

He shrugs. "Was it the same one?" she asks, her voice low, careful, her hand coming up to brush along the line of his jaw.

"Yeah."

_I'm capable of doing things you've never even dreamed of, _Maddox had said back in the barn, just after cracking the bones of Beckett's ring finger. Except now, Castle does dream of them, his overactive mind endlessly struggling to paint ever more horrifying pictures until he wakes up screaming, the terror of it tearing through his throat.

Beckett steps forward, wraps her arms around him. It was worse, those first few weeks, when she was so tentative about being touched and when touching was the only thing that would dissipate the swirling, unmoored panic that raced through his veins. They're better at steadying each other, now; they've found a faltering balance, a push and pull of comfort.

"My feet are going to fall off," he says after a long moment. He never knows how she stands it, wading into the freezing ocean and standing there for so long. At first he thought it was a way for her to ice away the pain, numb the lingering shock of that morning in the barn, but she's still doing it, week after week.

"Baby," she accuses, like always.

He tightens his arms around her and tugs backwards, urging her toward the shore. "You'll feel stupid when you have to push me around in a wheelchair for the rest of my life after they're forced to amputate."

She reaches up, brushes her lips along the underside of his jaw, then turns and loops her elbow through his, leading him back towards land (even now, even with her right hand, she'll hesitate before reaching out and wrapping her fingers around him). "What makes you think I'd stay with you, Castle?"

He bumps into her side, makes himself breathe through the brief tension in her muscles before she relaxes, nudging back against him. "Just my feet, Beckett. We all know _those_ aren't the reason you stay with me."

He tries to guide them back up to the house, but she makes a steady beeline for a flat, sun-warmed rock, her favorite place to sit. She drags them down onto it, letting him sit closer than she'll sometimes allow, his hip bumping up against hers, their shoulders brushing. "I guess it would take more than a double foot amputation," she says, her voice playful, but it still makes his heart stutter in his chest.

The better nightmares, the ones that don't drag him screaming out of sleep, are the ones in which she walks away, disappears into the hazy night, and he spends his lifetime walking moonlit Midwest woods, searching, always searching.

There's a look in her eyes he can't quite place. She draws her legs up, wraps her right arm around her shins, rests her chin on her knees as she stares out at the rolling sea.

"You're going to miss it," he says, the realization sparking suddenly through him.

She shrugs, humming noncommittally in the back of her throat. "I'm happy to be going back."

"Just happy?" They, Harwood, and a skeleton security team start the drive back to Manhattan at midnight. They'll get there in time to pick up Martha and Alexis from their red-eye into JFK. His heart thuds hard in anticipation when he thinks of seeing his family, seeing his home after so long, but his mind has twisted a sense of danger into Manhattan, and he can't help the slight panic that fizzles through him at the thought of going back there with Beckett.

"I'm ready," she says, which doesn't quite answer his question.

They'll still have protection in the city. Long's ties were numerous and difficult to trace, but the FBI and CIA have been chipping steadily away at them, until, last week, they determined that enough had been done. Enough to let them return, provided they keep some protection. Provided they're careful.

(There's a part of him that knows that there's only so careful they can be. There's a part of him that wants them to never go back.)

He needs to be closer to her.

He shifts, scooting behind her, drawing his knees up and around so that his legs bracket her, the insides of his thighs slanting against the curve of her sides, up to the thin bones of her ribcage. She holds her inhale in her lungs, her body going utterly still for several heartbeats before she melts back against him with a sigh. Tilting forward, he drops his open mouth to the juncture of her shoulder and neck, wraps his arms around her loosely, mindful of how much she hates to feel restrained. He waits, motionless, until she drops her head back onto his shoulder, her eyes closed, her face slanted up toward the sun.

The first time he'd found her on this rock, it was a week after they'd arrived. Her face had been at a similar angle, tracing the slow path of the four am moon through the cold night sky. "I thought it would feel more victorious," he'd told her as he'd sat beside her. "Killing Maddox. Taking down the Dragon."

She'd kept her face angled at the moon. "There are no victories," she'd said, her hoarse whisper barely carrying across the edge of the breeze, and he hadn't known what to say to that, couldn't do more than rest a tentative hand at her shoulder and try to will some warmth into her cold skin.

He's grateful, now, for the small things. The steady ease of her breathing against his chest. The way she's angled toward the sun, instead of toward the night sky.

"Gates said I could have my job back," she breathes, so quietly that he's sure, at first, that he's misheard.

He coughs, tries not to let his muscles tense around her. "When was this?" he asks, raising his lips off her neck.

"She called last week when you were in the shower. The day after they told us we would be able to go home."

Five days ago. He tries not to let it sting. "Just like that?"

"Pending psych and physical evals and a two-month probationary period."

She turns her face into his neck, her forehead pressing against his tendons, the heat of her breath dancing over his Adam's apple. "What are you going to do?" His voice comes out a little rougher than he'd intended.

She flinches. "I should have told you she called."

It comforts him, somehow, that she knows what's bothering him – not the possibility of her going back to the 12th, but the reality of her hiding that possibility from him. "Yeah," he breathes. He's had more than enough secrets.

"She told me to take all the time I needed. To think it over."

"So that's what you've been doing?"

She lifts her head slightly, nudging her nose into his neck. "No. I wasn't purposefully trying to keep it from you, Castle. I just - I can't get any perspective up here."

"You can't," he pushes, a little flatly.

"Or – too much perspective, maybe."

And that, that he does understand – the pushes and pulls of normal life are quiet here, less intense and desperate, the rhythms of Manhattan too many worlds away.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner." She presses her nose more firmly into his neck, as if the strength of the connection could make him trust her apology.

If only it worked like that. If only it could be that easy.

It does manage to distract him, though - the softness of her skin, the sweet smell of her hair mingled with the salty scent of the ocean. He breathes her in, brushes his lips along the slope of her nose, the curve of her cheek.

She shivers in his arms, and he wants to believe it's him, not the cooling air, not the light breeze coming in from the ocean, not some vague and haunting memory. Only him.

He twists his neck so he can get at her mouth, press his lips against hers. She tastes like the sea, tastes like loneliness, and she answers his kiss almost too delicately, with a gentleness that isn't her at all.

"Let's go back inside," he murmurs, his heart hammering in his chest. He doesn't want her alone out here, doesn't want her alone, period. Never again.

Never again.

"Okay," she sighs into his mouth.

* * *

"Weird, isn't it?" he asks, folding a shirt and lowering it onto a pair of jeans. Even months later, it feels wrong to be putting their clothes into the two duffle bags that Harwood secured for them.

She pauses, blinks at him. "Packing again?"

Oh. And seeing his family. And going back to Manhattan. "The, ah –" he gestures at their separate bags, feeling like an idiot – "the two duffles." Probably the least unsettling part of this entire situation.

"Your boxers lonely without my underwear, Castle?" she asks, her lips quirking up into a small smile.

"That's not fair. They were fine before you gave them a taste of what it was like."

He pushes a handful of socks into the side compartment before he realizes that she's too still, just standing there, frozen above her duffle bag, her fingers fisted tightly into a cotton shirt.

"What are you trying to say?" she asks.

They speak too much in subtext, so of course she's read into his statement something that he didn't quite intend. Only – after so long together, the thought of going home without her, the thought of waking up and reaching out and not finding the warm reassurance of her skin – even now, even when she's standing right in front of him, his throat constricts in panic.

She's still watching him warily, like at any moment he'll fling himself to one knee and propose. (It doesn't sound like as a bad an idea as it should. She only spent eleven days with those bands wrapped around her ring finger, but sometimes even now he'll catch himself glancing at her hand, searching for a glint of metal.)

He can control himself. No asking her to move in. No desperate attempts at an engagement. "Stay with me tomorrow?" he asks.

She smiles at him, her shoulders loosening. "You can't miss me already."

He pouts at her. "Who'll protect me from my nightmares?" He says it lightly, teasing, but even before the last syllable is out of his mouth he knows it was a mistake.

Her eyes darken and she freezes entirely, all traces of her smile falling from her face. "It's not funny, Castle," she whispers.

He knows she can't stand that he dreams about it. Knows that she blames herself for that, too, that it's one more burden she needlessly carries. He bobs his head, agreeing. "Tasteless." It doesn't exactly make it less true, though, and from the pained look in her eyes, she knows it.

He checks his watch. They still have an hour, and they're both nearly all the way packed. He walks around the bed, stopping in front of her, running his hands up her sides. She breathes out slowly, letting her forehead fall onto his clavicle. "It's not funny at all," she husks into his skin.

He reaches down, tilts her chin up so that he can brush his lips over hers in apology. "Let me make it up to you," he murmurs against her mouth.

"Castle," she breathes, pleading or warning or castigating or some combination of the three. He pulls back, tries to get a read on her, but the room is dark and he can only see the slight flush to her cheeks, the fathomless darkness in her eyes.

She meets his gaze, quirks her lips in a small, slightly-forced smile before nudging her hip into him, gently pushing him onto the too-firm mattress and then slowly lowering herself over him, her pelvis jostling into his and already, already making him gasp.

She's wearing a soft cotton button down, too thin for the night air. He finds that she's been doing that lately, wading into the cold ocean without thinking, dressing for weather twenty degrees warmer than the actual temperature. In New York, her closet was full of innumerable coats, and even in the light fall air she was always more than prepared for the weather, but here, even when she hasn't been wading into the sea, her skin is always slightly chilled.

Reaching up, he fumbles the top three buttons open as she watches him silently. He props himself up on his elbows, kissing the skin between her clavicles, running his lips down her sternum, over her smooth and pale skin, over the circle of her scar. She exhales sharply when he lowers himself back, gently wraps his hand around her left wrist, his fingers light over the cold plastic of the brace, and draws the hand up to his mouth, kissing the knuckle of her index finger before pulling her palm down to his chest, where she can surely feel the hectic thumping of his heart.

His gentleness undoes her, like always; he can see the moment when her eyes darken and her breath quickens and her careful containment unspools. She reaches down to the hem of his shirt and tugs it up, accomplished now at manipulating his clothing with one hand, then stills for a moment as he undoes the remainder of her buttons, pulling her top down off her shoulders. It catches on her elbows because she won't move her hands off his chest, won't stop raking her nails over his biceps and then down, down over his stomach, holding herself over him in a way that has to be hard to maintain. He pulls her down against him, his body jerking when the rough lace of her bra meets his chest, when the cool skin of her abdomen skids over his. The intimacy of the contact catches in his throat, making his hips roll up hard against her, the denim of their jeans suddenly unbearably frustrating.

She laughs into his mouth. "Easy, stud," she says with a smile that's finally free, but no, oh no, she's laughing at him and really that won't do at all.

He nudges one hand down between their bodies, flicks open the button of her jeans and drags his knuckles over her already-damp underwear, making her growl against his mouth. "What was that, Beckett?" he murmurs against her lips as he sets a slow, rolling rhythm with his hand.

She scrapes her teeth along his jaw, rocking down against his fingers as he nudges her underwear aside. "Don't get cocky, Castle."

He slips a finger inside her, moves carefully for a moment before adding another, twists his hand so that he's brushing over her with his thumb. The muscles of his forearm twist and strain with the awkward positioning, so much of her weight on him and her jeans forcing his arm at an unpleasant angle, but there's absolutely no way he can stop now when she's rocking her hips down against him, her breath coming in jagged, moaning gasps. "You don't want me to get co–"

"What – what did I tell you about puns while you're inside me?" she gasps into his jaw, sounding, he's fairly certain, far less threatening than she means to.

He stills briefly, blinking up at her. They've been over this. "That was _one _time and I was _quoting Shakespeare._"

She growls at him, thrusting hard into his hand. "That's still not a word you –" she must have found a good angle, her eyes slam shut briefly and she loses her sentence. "Christ, come _on_."

He smirks, fluttering his fingers briefly. "Well, don't let me stop you."

Glaring balefully at him, she pushes her right hand down, palms him through his jeans, putting pressure at the exactly the right place on his zipper, and, shit, his hand is moving again without his even noticing, pumping back and forth in rhythm that echoes the roll of his hips. Apparently that's all she needs, because she's leaning forward and biting into his shoulder and coming around his fingers with a low moan.

She drags herself up onto her knees abruptly, pulling her jeans off before reaching up to undo her bra one-handed. He lies back, his muscles a fascinating combination of electrified and liquefied, his eyes half closed, transfixed by the lithe, smooth lines of her body.

"Well?" she asks, flicking her gaze down at his still-buttoned jeans.

"You're just so _efficient_," he murmurs appreciatively.

"And you're so enervated."

"Ohhh, Beckett, a three dollar vocabulary word _and _alliteration."

"Three? Really?" she grumbles, disgruntled, but not quite enough that she's decided against taking matters into her own hands. She's already reaching down to work at the button of his pants.

"I mean," he says, lifting his hips for her and reaching a hand down to help her drag the jeans and boxers over his pelvis. "Somnolent. Phlegmatic. Dilatory. Lackadaisical. You just have so many good opt—"

And then he can't talk because somehow she's gotten his jeans around his ankles and her tongue is in his mouth and her hand is wrapped around him and his hips have started rocking into her palm without his permission at all.

She pulls her head back abruptly, stills her hand, and it's not _okay_, how easily she can undo him; her turnabout is not fair play at _all_. "Beckett," he whines, his hips thrusting up but reaching only air.

"No. By all means. Continue, my torpid thesaurus."

"Best superhero name ever," he says, propping himself up on his elbows to chase her mouth.

She laughs, briefly, breathily, leaning in to kiss him, reaching again for him with her hand as she lowers her body back over his, the slick heat of her hovering just above where he wants her.

She pauses for a moment, leans her head to the side, skims her mouth along the raised scar of his bicep. It's become a ritual for them that is somehow less than maudlin, taking a moment, any moment, to run their lips along each other's scars. They don't talk about it, but every time he feels the heat of her mouth over the white ridge of skin on his arm he imagines he can feel the apology and promise both, the tacit current of her love, her unspoken commitment to never leave him.

And then she's taking her hand away and sliding slowly onto him, raising her head back up so that their foreheads meet, noses bump, breaths mingle as they lie there still and silent. Sometimes still it catches in his throat – everything they've been through and they're still here, still alive, not quite whole, but just damaged enough to appreciate every second, every heartbeat of time that sparks between them.

She moves slowly, languorously over him, capturing his mouth with hers, running her hand over his hair, along the plane of his chest. He reaches down between their bodies, runs his fingers lightly just above where they're joined, revels in the low moan that tumbles from her lips.

She quickens, her hips rolling down harder against him. He lets her draw him into her rhythm, but _God _if she's going to do that she better be damn ready to –

"Beckett," he growls – groans, really – in warning. He keeps one hand pressed against her, grabs her hip with his other to change the angle slightly, and there it is, her teeth sinking into her lower lip, her eyes pressed together tightly, and then her jagged growl as her body tenses and tenses and tenses and finally pulses around him.

That's all it takes; he's a handful of uneven thrusts behind her before his own orgasm flashes through him, his eyes slamming shut as his muscles contract and his world funnels to only the feel of her.

When his breathing's steadier and he can open his eyes, she's smiling down at him, her hand running lightly over his hair. "And we still just have enough time to shower if we hurry."

Castle puffs his chest out. "Captain Torpid Thesaurus knows how to get the job done."

She shakes her head, but she doesn't quite quash the smile that flits across her lips before she leans down to kiss him briefly. Pulling away and sitting, she carefully stretches up and off the bed and starts to walk toward the bathroom. His mind flashes inanely back to the night in his loft, to the moment after he showed her the text when she stood up, shoved away, tried to leave him lying alone in his bed. _It's over_, he tries to tell himself, but he knows it's not, not really, knows that parts of this journey will be threaded through them for the rest of their lives.

She stops at the door to the bathroom, turns, her eyes slowly mapping him. "You coming, Castle?"

"Always am," he says, trying to keep his voice light, but from the depth of her gaze he thinks she hears it all.

* * *

He hoists a bag onto his shoulder, can't help how it echoes that night a lifetime ago in his loft, the start of a different sprawling nighttime journey.

He sees the memory of it in her eyes, too, in the quiet, serious way she suddenly regards him.

It's not as different as he wishes it were. Even now, they are walking into darkness. Even now, the Dragon captured, those who supported him slowly falling, even now she is not entirely safe.

She steps into him, starts to nudge him with her shoulder, then twists her body at the last instant, brushing her lips over his.

"You distracted me," he murmurs at her lips.

"What?"

"When I asked you to stay." He reaches up, loops his arms around her, rests his palms on her lower back. "You never answered. You used your feminine wiles."

He feels the sharp sting of her boot into his shin. "Who did what to who, Castle?"

"Well I certainly didn't use _my _womanly charms."

She huffs a laugh at him, rolls her eyes. "You sure about that?"

He works at a pout, but there's a heaviness, a pall over him that he can't quite shake.

She smiles at him briefly, a flash of amusement and love, before she's too serious. "We haven't even had one night together without…" she trails off, shaking her head. "Running. Hiding. Don't you want to just – be normal?"

Normal for her, in New York, isn't staying with him. But it could be. He cants his body into hers, taking the risk, holding her a little tighter. "Be normal with me."

She huffs a brief laugh against his throat.

He can't help but smile. "Well – you know - closer to, anyway. Tomorrow, Beckett. Stay with me tomorrow."

She draws back just enough to glance around the room that's been theirs for the past two months. He catches it, the flicker of hesitation and sadness in her eyes – as much as she's hated it, holing up, hiding away, they've come together in this, though this. He feels her slow sigh against his hands, the rise and fall of her back into his palms. "Tomorrow, then," she says, and it doesn't sound as much like a concession as it does a promise, the vague, limitless unfurling of a world of possibilities, an endless string of tomorrows.

He reaches down, lifts her wrist so that he can see the face of her watch, follows the steady flick of the silver minute hand as it carries them over to a new day. "You ready?" he asks, his mouth brushing over her forehead.

She tilts her face up, sweeps her lips over his. "Let's go."


End file.
